Modern essays

THE LIBRARY OF THE

UNIVERSITY OF

NORTH CAROLINA

4-

i>^;^:^^^

THE COLLECTION OF

NORTH CAROLINIANA

ENDOWED BY

JOHN SPRUNT HILL

CLASS OF 1889
CB

H523f2

UNIVERSITY OF N.C. AT CHAPEL HILL

00032193536

This book must not
be taken from the
Library building.

Form No. 471

MODERN ESSAYS

SELECTED BY

CHRISTOPHER MORLEY

NEW YORK
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY

COPYRIGHT. I02T, BY
HAJICOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, IKCo

PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY

QUINN a BODEN COMPANY. INC.

RAHWAY. N. J.

PREFACE

It had been my habit, I am now aware, to speak
somewhat hghtly of the labors of anthologists: to
insinuate that they led lives of bland sedentary ease.
I shall not do so again. When the publisher suggested
a collection of representative contemporary essays, I
thought it would be the most lenient of tasks. But
experience is a fine aperitive to the mind.

Indeed the pangs of the anthologist, if he has con-
science, are burdensome. There are so many consid-
erations to be tenderly weighed; personal taste must
sometimes be set aside in view of the general plan;
for every item chosen half a dozen will have been
affectionately conned and sifted; and perhaps some
favorite pieces will be denied because the authors have
reasons for withholding permission. It would be en-
joyable (for me, at any rate) to write an essay on the
things I have lingered over with intent to include them
in this little book, but have finally sacrificed for one
reason or another. How many times — twenty at least
— I have taken down from my shelf Mr. Chesterton's

-^The Victorian Age in Literature to reconsider whether

Ob in

0«i

iv Preface

his ten pages on Dickens, or his glorious summing-up
of Decadents and ^Esthetes, were not absolutely essen-
tial. How many times I have palpitated upon certain
passages in The Education of Henry Adams and in
Mr. Wells's Outline of History, which, I assured my-
self, would legitimately stand as essays if shrewdly
excerpted.

But I usually concluded that would not be quite
fair. I have not been overscrupulous in this matter,
for the essay is a mood rather than a form ; the fron-
tier between the essay and the short story is as imper-
ceptible as is at present the once famous Mason and
Dixon line. Indeed, in that pleasant lowland country
between the two empires lie (to my way of think-
ing) some of the most fertile fields of prose — fiction
that expresses feeling and character and setting rather
than action and plot; fiction beautifully ripened by the
lingering mild sunshine of the essayist*s mood. This
is fiction, I might add, extremely unlikely to get into
the movies. I think of short stories such as George
Gissing's, in that too little known volume The House
of Cobwebs, which I read again and again at midnight
with unfailing delight; fall asleep over; forget; and
again re-read with undiminished satisfaction. They
have no brilliance of phrase, no smart surprises, no
worked-up 'situations* which have to be taken at high
speed to pass without breakdown over their brittle

Preface Y

bridgework of credibility. They have only the mod-
est and faintly melancholy savor of life itself.

Yet it is a mere quibble to pretend that the essay
does not have easily recognizable manners. It may
be severely planned, or it may ramble in ungirdled
mood, but it has its own point of view that marks it
from the short story proper, or the merely personal
memoir. That distinction, easily felt by the sensi-
tive reader, is not readily expressible. Perhaps the
true meaning of the word essay — an attempt — gives
a clue. No matter how personal or trifling the topic
may be, there is always a tendency to generalize, to
walk round the subject or the experience, and view
it from several vantages; instead of (as in the short
story) cutting a carefully landscaped path through a
chosen tract of human complication. So an essay can
never be more than an attempt, for it is an excursion
into the endless. Any student of fiction will admit that
in the composition of a short story many entertaining
and valuable elaborations may rise in the mind of the
author which must be strictly rejected because they
do not forward the essential motive. But in the essay
(of an informal sort) we ask not relevance to plot,
but relevance to mood. That is why there are so
many essays that are mere marking time. The familiar
essay is easier to write than the short story, but it im-
poses equal restraints on a scrupulous author. For in

VI Preface

fiction the writer is controlled and limited and swept
along by his material; but in the essay, the writer rides
his pen. A good story, once clearly conceived, almost
writes itself; but essays are written.

There also we find a pitfall of the personal essay —
the temptation to become too ostentatiously quaint,
too deliberately 'whimsical' (the word which, by
loathsome repetition, has become emetic). The fine
flavor and genius of the essay — as in Bacon and
Montaigne, Lamb, Hazlitt, Thackeray, Thoreau; per-
haps even in Stevenson — is the rich bouquet of per-
sonality. But soliloquy must not fall into monologue.
One might put it thus : that the perfection of the
familiar essay is a conscious revelation of self done
inadvertently.

The art of the anthologist is the art of the host : his
tact is exerted in choosing a congenial group ; making
them feel comfortable and at ease; keeping the wine
and tobacco in circulation; while his eye is tenderly
alert down the bright vista of tablecloth, for any lapse
in the general cheer. It is well, also, for him to hold
himself discreetly in the background, giving his guests
the pleasure of clinching the jape, and seeking only, by
innocent wiles, to draw each one Into some charac-
teristic and felicitous vein. I think T can offer you, In
this parliament of philomaths, entertainment of the

Preface vii

most genuine sort; and having said so much, I might
well retire and be heard no more.

But I think it is well to state, as even the most bashful
host may do, just why this particular company has been
called together. My intention is not merely to please
the amiable dilettante, though I hope to do that too.
I made my choices, first and foremost, with a view to
stimulating those who are themselves interested in
the arts of writing. I have, to be frank, a secret am-
bition that a book of this sort may even be used as a
small but useful weapon in the classroom. I wanted to
bring it home to the student that as brilliant and sin-
cere work is being done to-day in the essay as in any
period of our literature. Accordingly the pieces re-
printed here are very diverse. There is the grand
manner; there is foolery; there is straight foru'ard
literary criticism; there is pathos, politics, and the pic-
turesque. But every selection is, in its own way,
a work of art. And I would call the reader's atten-
tion to this: that the greater number of these essays
were written not by retired aesthetes, but by practising
journalists in the harness of the daily or weekly press.
The names of some of the most widely bruited essay-
ists of our day are absent from this roster, not by
malice, but because I desired to include material less
generally known.

viii Preface

I should apologize, I suppose, for the very informal
tone of the introductory notes on each author. But I
conceived the reader in the role of a friend spending
the evening in happy gossip along the shelves. Pulling
out one's favorites and talking about them, now and
then reading a chosen extract aloud, and ending (some
time after midnight) by choosing some special volume
for the guest to take to bed with him — in the same
spirit I have compiled this collection. Perhaps the edi-
torial comments have too much the manner of dress-
ing gown and slippers; but what a pleasant book this
will be to read in bed!

And perhaps this collection may be regarded as a
small contribution to Anglo-American friendliness.
Of course when I say Anglo-, I mean Brito-, but that
is such a hideous prefix. Journalists on this side are
much better acquainted with what their professional
colleagues are doing In Britain, than they with our
concerns. But surely there should be a congenial fra-
ternity of spirit among all who use the English tongue
in print. There are some of us who even imagine a
day when there may be regular international exchanges
of journalists, as there have been of scholars and stu-
dents. The contributions to this book are rather evenly
divided between British and American hands; and per-
haps it is not insignificant that two of the most pleas-

Preface ix

ing items come from Canada, where they often com-
bine the virtues of both sides.

It is a pleasant task to thank the authors and pub-
lishers who have assented to the reprinting of these
pieces. To the authors themselves, and to the follow-
ing publishers, I admit my sincere gratitude for the use
of material copyrighted by them: — Doubleday Page
and Company for the extracts from books by John
Macy, Stewart Edward White and Pearsall Smith;
Charles Scribner's Sons for Rupert Brooke's Niagara
Falls; the New York Sun for Don Marquis's Almost
Perfect State; the George H. Doran Company for the
essays by Joyce Kilmer and Robert Cortes Holliday;
Mr. James B. Pinker for permission to reprint Mr.
Conrad's Preface to A Personal Record; Alfred A.
Knopf, Inc., for the essays by H. M. Tomlinson, A. P.
Herbert and Philip Guedalla; Lady Osier for the essay
by the late Sir William Osier; Henry Holt and Com-
pany for Thomas Burke's The Russian Quarter; E. P.
Button and Company for A Word for Autumn, by
A. A. Milne; the New York Evening Post for the
essays by Stuart P. Sherman and Harry Esty Bounce ;
Harper and Brothers for Marian Storm's A Wood-
land Valentine; Bodd, Mead and Company for Simeon
Strunsky's Nocturne, from his volume Post-Impres-
sions; the Macmillan Company for Beer and Cider^

X Preface

from Professor Saintsbury's Notes on a Cellar Book;
Longmans Green and Company for Bertrand Russell's
A Free Man's Worship, from Mysticism and Logic;
Robert M. McBride and Company for the selection
from James Branch Cabell; Harcourt, Brace and
Company for the essay by Heywood Broun; The
Weekly Review for the essays by O. W. Firkins, Harry
Morgan Ayres and Robert Palfrey Utter. The pres-
ent ownership of the copyright of the essay by Louise
Imogen Guiney I have been unable to discover. It
was published in Patrins (Copeland and Day, 1897),
which has long been out of print. Knowing the purity
of my motives I have used this essay, hoping that it
might introduce Miss Guiney*s exquisite work to the
younger generation that knows her hardly at all.

Christopher Morle\
October, igzi

CONTENTS

Preface

American Literature . , .

Mary White

Niagara Falls

The Almost Perfect State .
"The Man o' War's 'Er 'Us-

band"

The Market

Holy Ireland

A Familiar Preface ....

On Drawing

.,X). Henry

The Mowing of a Field. . .
The Student Life ....
The Decline of the Drama .
America and the English

Tradition

The Russian Quarter . . .
A Word for Autumn . . .
"A Clergyman" . . . . .

Samuel Butler

Bed-Books and Night-Lights .
The Precept of Peace .
On Lying Awake at Night .
A Woodland Valentine . .
The Elements of Poetry . .

Nocturne

Beer and Cider

A Free Man's Worship . .

Some Historians

Winter Mist

Trivia

Beyond Life

The Fish Reporter ....
Some Nonsense About a Dog .
The Fifty-first Dragon . .

t-e

John Macy .
William Allen Wh
Rupert Brooke .
Don Marquis

David W. Bone
William McFee
Joyce Kilmer .
Joseph Conrad .
A. P. Herbert .
O. W. Firkins .
Hilaire Belloc .
William Osier .
Stephen Leacock

Harry Morgan Ayres
Thomas Burke . ;
A. A. Milne . . .
Max Beerbohm
Stuart P. Sherman
H. M. Tomlinson .
Louise Imogen Guiney
Stewart Edward White
Marian Storm .
George Sanfayana .
Simeon Strunsky .
George Saintsbury
Bertrand Russell .
Philip Guedalla
Robert Palfrey Utter .
Logan Pearsall Smith
James Branch Cabell .
Robert Cortes Holliday
Harry Esty Dounce .
Heywood Broun .

MODERN ESSAYS

AMERICAN LITERATURE
By John Macy

This vigorous survey of American letters is the first chapter
of John Macy's admirable volume The Spirit of American Lit"
erature, published in 1913 — a book shrewd, penetrating and salty,
which has unfortunctely never reached one-tenth of the many
readers who would find it permanently delightful and profitable.
Mr. Macy has no skill in vaudeville tricks to call attention to
himself: no shafts of limelight have followed him across the
stage. But those who have an eye for criticism that is vivacious
without bombast, austere without bitterness, keen without malice,
know him as one of the truly competent and liberal-minded ob-
servers of the literary scene.

Mr. Macy was born in Detroit, 1877 ; graduated from Harvard
in 1899; did editorial service on the Youth's Companion and the
Boston Herald; and nowadays lives pensively in Greenwich Vil-
lage, writing a good deal for The Freeman and The Literary
Review. Perhaps, if you were wandering on Fourth Street, east
of Sixth Avenue, you might see him treading thoughtfully along,
with a wide sombrero hat, and always troubled by an iron-gray
forelock that droops over his brow. You would know, as soon
as vou saw him, that he is a man greatly lovable. I like to
think of him as I first saw him, some years ago, in front of the
bright hearth of the charming St. Botolph Club in Boston, where
he was usually the center of an animated group of nocturnal
philosophers.

The essay was written in 1912, before the very real reawaken-
ing of American creative work that began in the 'teens of this
century. The reader will find it interesting to consider how far
Mr. Macy's remarks might be modified if he were writing to-day.

The Spirit of American Literature has been reissued in an
inexpensive edition by Boni and Liveright. It is a book well
worth owning.

American literature is a branch of English litera-
ture, as truly as are English books written in Scotland
or South Africa. Our literature lies almost entirely
in the nineteenth century when the ideas and books of

3

4 John Macy

the western world were freely interchanged among
the nations and became accessible to an increasing num-
ber of readers. In literature nationality is determined
by language rather than by blood or geography. M.
Maeterlinck, born a subject of King Leopold, belongs
to French literature. Mr. Joseph Conrad, born in
Poland, is already an English classic. Geography,
much less important in the nineteenth century than
before, was never, among modern European nations,
so important as we sometimes are asked to believe.
Of the ancestors of English literature **Beowulf" is
scarcely more significant, and rather less graceful, than
our tree-inhabiting forebears with prehensile toes; the
true progenitors of English literature are Greek, Latin,
Hebrew, Italian, and French.

American literature and English literature of the
nineteenth century are parallel derivatives from pre-
ceding centuries of English literature. Literature is a
succession of books from books. Artistic expression
springs from life ultimately but not immediately. It
may be likened to a river which is swollen throughout
its course by new tributaries and by the seepages of
its banks; it reflects the life through which it flows,
taking color from the shores; the shores modify it,
but its power and volume descend from distant head-
waters and affluents far up stream. Or it may be
likened to the race-life which our food nourishes or

American Literature 5

impoverishes, which our individual circumstances
foster or damage, but which flows on through us,
strangely impersonal and beyond our power to kill or
create.

It is well for a writer to say: "Away with books!
I will draw my inspiration from life!'* For we have
too many books that are simply better books diluted
by John Smith. At the same time, literature is not
born spontaneously out of life. Every book has its
literary parentage, and students find it so easy to trace
genealogies that much criticism reads like an Old
Testament chapter of "begats." Every novel was
suckled at the breasts of older novels, and great
mothers are often prolific of anaemic offspring. The
stock falls off and revives, goes a-wandering, and re-
turns like a prodigal. The family records get blurred.
But of the main fact of descent there is no doubt.

American literature is English literature made in
this country. Its nineteenth-century characteristics
are evident and can be analyzed and discussed with
some degree of certainty. Its "American" character-
istics— no critic that I know has ever given a good
account of them. You can define certain peculiarities
of American politics, American agriculture, Ameri-
can public schools, even American religion. But what
is uniquely American in American literature? Poe is
just as American as Mark Twain; Lanier is just as

6 John Macy

American as Whittier. The American spirit in litera-
ture is a myth, hke American valor in war, which is
precisely like the valor of Italians and Japanese. The
American, deluded by a falsely idealized image which
he calls America, can say that the purity of Longfellow
represents the purity of American home life. An Irish
Englishman, Air. Bernard Shaw, with another falsely
idealized image of America, surprised that a face does
not fit his image, can ask: ''What is Poe doing in
that galley?" There is no answer. You never can
tell. Poe could not help it. He was born in Boston,
and lived in Richmond, New York, Baltimore, Phila-
delphia. Professor van Dyke says that Poe was a
maker of "decidedly un-American cameos," but I do
not understand what that means. Facts are uncom-
fortable consorts of prejudices and emotional gener-
alities ; they spoil domestic peace, and when there is a
separation they sit solid at home while the other party
goes. Irving, a shy, sensitive gentleman, who wrote
with fastidious care, said : "It has been a matter of
marvel, to European readers, that a man from the
wilds of America should express himself in tolerable
English." It is a matter of marvel, just as it is a
marvel that Blake and Keats flowered in the brutal
city of London a hundred years ago.

The literary mind is strengthened and nurtured, is
influenced and mastered, by the accumulated riches of

American Literature 7

literature. In the last century the strongest thinkers
in our language were Englishmen, and not only the
traditional but the contemporary influences on our
thinkers and artists were British. This may account
for one negative characteristic of American literature
— its lack of American quality. True, our records
must reflect our life. Our poets, enamored of night-
ingales and Persian gardens, have not altogether for-
gotten the mocking-bird and the woods of Maine.
Fiction, written by inhabitants of New York, Ohio,
and Massachusetts, does tell us something of the ways
of life in those mighty commonwealths, just as Eng-
lish fiction written by Lancashire men about Lanca-
shire people is saturated with the dialect, the local
habits and scenery of that county. But wherever an
English-speaking man of imagination may dwell, in
Dorset or Calcutta or Indianapolis, he is subject to
the strong arm of the empire of English literature; he
cannot escape it; it tears him out of his obscure bed
and makes a happy slave of him. He is assigned to
the department of the service for which his gifts
qualify him, and his special education is undertaken by
drill-masters and captains who hail from provinces far
from his birthplace.

Dickens, who writes of London, influences Bret
Harte, who writes of CaHfornia, and Bret Harte in-
fluences Kipling, who writes of India. Each is in-

8 John Macy

tensely local in subject matter. The affinity between
them is a matter of temperament, manifested, for ex-
ample, in the swagger and exaggeration characteristic
of all three. California did not "produce'* Bret Harte ;
the power of Dickens was greater than that of the
Sierras and the Golden Gate. Bret Harte created a
California that never existed, and Indian gentlemen,
Caucasian and Hindoo, tell us that Kipling invented an
army and an empire unknown to geographers and war-
offices.

The ideas at work among these English men of let-
ters are world-encircling and fly between book and
brain. The dominant power is on the British Islands,
and the prevailing stream of influence flows west
across the Atlantic. Sometimes it turns and runs the
other way. Poe influenced Rossetti; Whitman influ-
enced Henley. For a century Cooper has been in com-
mand of the British literary marine. Literature is
reprehensibly unpatriotic, even though its votaries are,
as individual citizens, afflicted with local prides and
hostilities. It takes only a dramatic interest in the
guns of Yorktown. Its philosophy was nobly uttered
by Gaston Paris in the College de France in 1870,
when the city was beleaguered by the German armies :
"Common studies, pursued in the same spirit, in all
civilized countries, form, beyond the restrictions of
diverse and often hostile nationalities, a great country

American Literature 9

which no war profanes, no conqueror menaces, where
souls find that refuge and unity which in former times
was offered them by the city of God." The cathoHcity
of English language and literature transcends the tem-
poral boundaries of states.

What, then, of the "provincialism" of the American
province of the empire of British literature? Is it an
observable general characteristic, and is it a virtue or
a vice ? There is a sense in which American literature
is not provincial enough. The most provincial of all
literature Is the Greek. The Greeks knew nothing out-
side of Greece and needed to know nothing. The Old
Testament is tribal in its provinciality; its god is a
local god, and its village police and sanitary regulations
are erected into eternal laws. If this racial localism is
not essential to the greatness of early literatures, it is
inseparable from them; we find it there. It is not
possible in our cosmopolitan age and there are few
traces of it in American books. No American poet
has sung of his neighborhood with naive passion, as if
it were all the world to him. Whitman is pugnaciously
American, but his sympathies are universal, his vision
is cosmic ; when he seems to be standing in a city street
looking at life, he is in a trance, and his spirit is racing
with the winds.

The welcome that we gave Whitman betrays the lack
of an admirable kind of provincialism; it shows lis

lO John Macy

defective in local security of judgment. Some of U3
have been so anxiously abashed by high standards of
European culture that we could not see a poet in our
own back yard until European poets and critics told
us he was there. This is queerly contradictory to a
disposition found in some Americans to disregard
world standards and proclaim a third-rate poet as the
Milton of Oshkosh or the Shelley of San Francisco.
The passage in Lowell's "Fable for Critics" about
*The American Bulwers, Disraelis and Scotts" is a
spoonful of salt in the mouth of that sort of gaping
village reverence.

Of dignified and self-respecting provincialism, such
as Professor Royce so eloquently advocates, there
might well be more in American books. Our poets
desert the domestic landscape to write pseudo-Eliza-
bethan dramas and sonnets about Mont Blanc. They
set up an artificial Tennyson park on the banks of the
Hudson. Beside the shores of Lake Michigan they
croon the love affairs of an Arab in the desert and his
noble steed. This is not a very grave offence, for poets
live among the stars, and it makes no difference from
what point of the earth's surface they set forth on
their aerial adventures. A Wisconsin poet may write
very beautifully about nightingales, and a New Eng-
land Unitarian may write beautifully about cathedrals;
if it is beautiful, it is poetry, and all is well.

American Literature II

The novelists are the worst offenders. There have
been few of them; they have not been adequate in
numbers or in genius to the task of describing the
sections of the country, the varied scenes and habits
from New Orleans to the Portlands. And yet, small
band as they are, with great domestic opportunities
and responsibilities, they have devoted volumes to
Paris, which has an able native corps of story-makers,
and to Italy, where the home talent is first-rate. In
this sense American literature is too globe-trotting, it
has too little savor of the soil.

Of provincialism of the narrowest type American
writers, like other men of imagination, are not guilty
to any reprehensible degree. It is a vice sometimes
imputed to them by provincial critics who view litera-
ture from the office of a London weekly review or
from the lecture rooms of American colleges. Some
American writers are parochial, for example, Whittier.
Others, like Mr. Henry James, are provincial in out-
look, but cosmopolitan in experience, and reveal their
provinciality by a self-conscious internationalism.
Probably English and French writers may be similarly
classified as provincial or not. Mr. James says that
Poe's collection of critical sketches "is probably the
most complete and exquisite specimen of provincialism
ever prepared for the edification of men." It is noth-
ing like that. It is an example of what happens when

12 John Macy

a hack reviewer's work in local journals is collected
into a volume because he turns out to be a genius. The
list of Poe's victims is not more remarkable for the
number of nonentities it includes than ''The Lives of
the Poets" by the great Doctor Johnson, who was
hack for a bookseller, and "introduced" all the poets
that the taste of the time encouraged the bookseller
to print. Poe was cosmopolitan in spirit ; his prejudices
were personal and highly original, usually against the
prejudices of his moment and milieu. Hawthorne is less
provincial, in the derogatory sense, than his charming
biographer, Mr. James, as wall become evident if one
compares Hawthorne's American notes on England,
written in long ago days of national rancor, with Mr.
James's British notes on America (''The American
Scene"), written in our happy days of spacious vision.
Emerson's ensphering universality overspreads
Carlyle like the sky above a volcanic island. Indeed
Carlyle (who knew more about American life and
about what other people ought to do than any other
British writer earlier than Mr. Chesterton) justly com-
plains that Emerson is not sufficiently local and con-
crete; Carlyle longs to see "some Event, Man's Life,
American Forest, or piece of creation which this
Emerson loves and wonders at, well Emersonized."
Longfellow would not stay at home and write more
about the excellent village blacksmith ; he made poetical

American Literature 13

tours of Europe and translated songs and legends from
several languages for the delight of the villagers who
remained behind. Lowell was so heartily cosmopolitan
that American newspapers accused him of Anglomania
— which proves their provincialism but acquits him.
Mr. Howells has written a better book about Venice
than about Ohio. Mark Twain lived in every part of
America, from Connecticut to California, he wrote
about every country under the sun (and about some
countries beyond the sun), he is read by all sorts and
conditions of men in the English-speaking world, and
he is an adopted hero in Vienna. It is difficult to
come to any conclusion about provincialism as a char-
acteristic of American literature.

American literature is on the whole idealistic, sweet,
delicate, nicely finished. There is little of it which
might not have appeared in the Youth's Companion.
The notable exceptions are our most stalwart men oi
genius, Thoreau, Whitman, and Mark Twain. Any
child can read American literature, and if it does not
make a man of him, it at least will not lead him into
forbidden realms. Indeed, American books too seldom
come to grips with the problems of life, especially the
books cast in artistic forms. The essayists, expounders,
and preachers attack life vigorously and wrestle with
the meaning of it. The poets are thin, moonshiny,
meticulous in technique. Novelists are few and feeble.

14 John Macy

and dramatists are non-existent. These generalities,
subject to exceptions, are confirmed by a reading of
the first fifteen volumes of the Atlantic Monthly, which
are a treasure-house of the richest period of American
literary expression. In those volumes one finds a sur-
prising number of vigorous, distinguished papers on
pohtics, philosophy, science, even on literature and art.
Many talented men and women, whose names are not
well remembered, are clustered there about the half
dozen salient men of genius; and the collection gives
one a sense that the New England mind (aided by the
outlying contributors) was, in its one Age of Thought,
an abundant and diversified power. But the poetry is
not memorable, except for some verses by the few
standard poets. And the fiction is naive. Edward
Everett Hale's "The Man Without a Country" is al-
most the only story there that one comes on with a
thrill either of recognition or of discovery.

It is hard to explain why the American, except in his
exhortatory and passionately argumentative moods, has
not struck deep into American life, why his stories and
verses are, for the most part, only pretty things, nicely
unimportant. Anthony Trollope had a theory that the
absence of international copyright threw our market
open too unrestrictedly to the British product, that the
American novel was an unprotected infant industry;
we printed Dickens and the rest without paying royalty

American Literature 15

and starved the domestic manufacturer. This theory
does not explain. For there were many American
novelists, published, read, and probably paid for their
work. The trouble is that they lacked genius; they
dealt with trivial, slight aspects of life; they did not
take the novel seriously in the right sense of the word,
though no doubt they were in another sense serious
enough about their poor productions. ''Uncle Tom's
Cabin" and ''Huckleberry Finn" are colossal exceptions
to the prevailing weakness and superficiality of Ameri-
can novels.

Why do American writers turn their backs on life,
miss its intensities, its significance? The American
Civil War was the most tremendous upheaval in the
world after the Napoleonic period. The imaginative
reaction on it consists of some fine essays, Lincoln's
addresses. Whitman's war poetry, "Uncle Tom's
Cabin" (which came before the war but is part of it),
one or two passionate hymns by Whittier, the second
series of the "Biglow Papers," Hale's "The Man With-
out a Country" — and what else? The novels laid in
war-time are either sanguine melodrama or absurd
idyls of maidens whose lovers are at the front — a
tragic theme if tragically and not sentimentally con-
ceived. Perhaps the bullet that killed Theodore Win-
throp deprived us of our great novelist of the Civil
War, for he was on the right road. In a general

1 6 John Macy

speculation such a might-have-been is not altogether
futile; if Milton had died of whooping cough there
would not have been any ^'Paradise Lost"; the reverse
of this is that some geniuses whose works ought in-
evitably to have been produced by this or that national
development may have died too soon. This suggestion,
however, need not be gravely argued. The fact is
that the American literary imagination after the Civil
War was almost sterile. If no books had been written,
the failure of that conflict to get itself embodied in
some masterpieces would be less disconcerting. But
thousands of books were written by people who knew
the war at first hand and who had literary ambition and
some skill, and from all these books none rises to dis-
tinction.

An example of what seems to be the American habit
of writing about everything except American life, is
the work of General Lew Wallace. Wallace was one
of the important secondary generals in the Civil War,
distinguished at Fort Donelson and at Shiloh. After
the war he wrote "Ben-Hur," a doubly abominable
book, because it is not badly written and it shows a
lively imagination. There is nothing in it so valuable,
so dramatically significant as a week in Wallace's war
experiences. "Ben-Hur," fit work for a country clergy-
man with a pretty literary gift, is a ridiculous inanity
to come from a man who has seen the things that

American Literature 17

Wallace saw! It is understandable that the man of
experience may not write at all, and, on the other hand^
that the man of secluded life may have the imagination
to make a military epic. But for a man crammed with
experience of the most dramatic sort and discovering
the ability and the ambition to write — for him to make
spurious oriental romances which achieve an enormous
popularity! The case is too grotesque to be typical,
yet it is exceptional in degree rather than in kind.
The American literary artist has written about every-
thing under the skies except what matters most in his
own life. General Grant^s plain autobiography, not art
and of course not attempting to be, is better Hterature
than most of our books in artistic forms, because of
its intellectual integrity and the profound importance
of the subject-matter.

Our dreamers have dreamed about many wonderful
things, but their faces have been averted from the
mightier issues of life. They have been high-minded,
fine-grained, eloquent in manner, in odd contrast to
the real or reputed vigor and crudeness of the nation.
In the hundred years from Irving's first romance to
Mr. Howells's latest unromantic novel, most of our
books are eminent for just those virtues which Amer-
ica is supposed to lack. Their physique is feminine;
they are fanciful, dainty, reserved; they are literose,
sophisticated in craftsmanship, but innocentlv unaware

1 8 John Macy

of the profound agitations of American life, of life
everywhere. Those who strike the deeper notes of
reality, Whitman, Thoreau, Mark Twain, Mrs. Stowe
in her one great book, Whittier, Lowell and Emerson
at their best, are a powerful minority. The rest, beau-
tiful and fine in spirit, too seldom show that they are
conscious of contemporaneous realities, too seldom vi-
brate with a tremendous sense of life.

The Jason of western exploration writes as if he
had passed his life in a library. The Ulysses of great
rivers and perilous seas is a connoisseur of Japanese
prints. The warrior of 'Sixty-one rivals Miss Marie
Corelli. The mining engineer carves cherry stones.
He who is figured as gaunt, hardy and aggressive,
conquering the desert with the steam locomotive,
sings of a pretty little rose in a pretty little garden.
The judge, haggard with experience, who presides over
the most tragi-comic divorce court ever devised by
man, writes love stories that would have made Jane
Austen smile.

Mr. Arnold Bennett is reported to have said that if
Balzac had seen Pittsburgh, he would have cried :
''Give me a pen !" The truth is, the whole country is
crying out for those who will record it, satirize it,
chant it. As literary material, it is virgin land, ancient
as life and fresh as a wilderness. American literature
is one occupation which is not over-crowded, in which,

American , Literature 19

indeed, there is all too little competition for the new-
comer to meet. There are signs that some earnest
young writers are discovering the fertility of a soil
that has scarcely been scratched.

American fiction shows all sorts of merit, but the
merits are not assembled, concentrated; the fine is
weak, and the strong is crude. The stories of Poe,
Hawthorne, Howells, James, Aldrich, Bret Harte, are
admirable in manner, but they are thin in substance,
not of large vitality. On the other hand, some of the
stronger American fictions fail in workmanship; for
example, ''Uncle Tom's Cabin," which is still vivid
and moving long after its tractarian interest has faded :
the novels of Frank Norris, a man of great vision and
high purpose, who attempted to put national economics
into something like an epic of daily bread; and Herman
Melville's "Moby Dick," a madly eloquent romance of
the sea. A few American novelists have felt the mean-
ing of the life they knew and have tried sincerely to
set it down, but have for various reasons failed to
make first-rate novels ; for example, Edward Eggleston,
whose stories of early Indiana have the breath of ac-
tuality in them; Mr. E. W. Howe, author of 'The
Story of a Country Town"; Harold Frederic, a man of
great ability, whose work was growing deeper, more
significant when he died; George W. Cable, whose
novels are unsteady and sentimental, but who gives a

20 John Macy

genuine impression of having portrayed a city and its
people; and Stephen Crane, who, dead at thirty, had
given in "The Red Badge of Courage" and "Maggie"
the promise of better work. Of good short stories
America has been proHfic. Mrs. Wilkins-Freeman,
Mrs. Annie Trumbull Slosson, Sarah Orne Jewett,
Rowland Robinson, H. C. Bunner, Edward Everett
Hale, Frank Stockton, Joel Chandler Harris, and "O.
Henry" are some of those whose short stories are per-
fect in their several kinds. But the American novel,
which multiplies past counting, remains an inferior
production.

On a private shelf of contemporary fiction and
drama in the English language are tne works of ten
British authors, Mr. Galsworthy, Mr. H. G. Wells,
Mr. Arnold Bennett, Mr. Eden Phillpotts, Mr. George
Moore, Mr. Leonard Merrick, Mr. J. C. Snaith, Miss
May Sinclair, Mr. William De Morgan, Mr. Maurice
Hewlett, Mr. Joseph Conrad, Mr. Bernard Shaw, yes,
and Mr. Rudyard Kipling. Beside them I find but
two Americans, Mrs. Edith Wharton and Mr. Theo-
dore Dreiser. There may be others, for one cannot
pretend to know all the living novelists and dramatists.
Yet for every American that should be added, I would
agree to add four to the British list. However, a con-
temporary literature that includes Mrs. Wharton*s
"Ethan Frome" and Mr. Dreiser's "Jennie Gerhardt"

American Literature 21

both published last year, is not to be despaired of.
In the course of a century a few Americans have
said in memorable words what life meant to them.
Their performance, put together, is considerable, if
not imposing. Any sense of dissatisfaction that one
feels in contemplating it is due to the disproportion be-
tween a limited expression and the multifarious im-
mensity of the country. Our literature, judged by the
great literatures contemporaneous with it, is insuffi-
cient to the opportunity and the need. The American
Spirit may be figured as petitioning the Muses for
twelve novelists, ten poets, and eight dramatists, to be
delivered at the earliest possible moment.

MARY WHITE
By William Allen White

Mary White — ons seems to know her after reading this sketch
written by her father on the day she was buried — would surely
have laughed unbelievingly if told she would be in a book of
this sort, together with Joseph Conrad, one of whose books lay
on her table. But the pen, in the honest hand, has always been
mightier than the grave.

This is not the sort of thing one wishes to mar with clumsy
comment. It was written for the Emporia Gazette, which Wil-
liam Allen White has edited since 1895. He is one of the best-
known, most public-spirited and most truly loved of Am.erican
journalists. He and his fellow-Kansan, E. W. Howe of Atchison,
are two characteristic figures in our newspaper world, both
masters of that vein of canny, straightforward, humane and
humorous simplicity that seems to be a Kansas birthright.

Mr. White was born in Emporia in 1868.

The Associated Press reports carrying the news of
Mary White's death declared that it came as the
result of a fall from a horse. How she would have
hooted at that! She never fell from a horse in her
life. Horses have fallen on her and with her — "I'm
always trying to hold 'em in my lap," she used to say.
But she was proud of few things, and one was that
she could ride anything that had four legs and hair.
Her death resulted not from a fall, but from a blow
on the head which fractured her skull, and the blow
came from the limb of an overhanging tree on the
parking.

22

Mary White 23

The last hour of her hfe was typical of its happi-
ness. She came home from a day's work at school,
topped off by a hard grind with the copy on the High
School Annual, and felt that a ride would refresh her.
She climbed into her khakis, chattering to her mother
about the work she was doing, and hurried to get her
horse and be out on the dirt roads for the country air
and the radiant green fields of the spring. As she rode
through the town on an easy gallop she kept waving at
passers-by. She knew everyone in town. For a dec-
ade the little figure with the long pig-tail and the red
hair ribbon has been familiar on the streets of Em-
poria, and she got in the way of speaking to those who
nodded at her. She passed the Kerrs, walking the
horse, in front of the Normal Library, and waved at
them ; passed another friend a few hundred feet further
on, and waved at her. The horse was walking and,
as she turned into North Merchant Street she took off
her cowboy hat, and the horse swung into a lope. She
passed the Tripletts and waved her cowboy hat at them,
still moving gaily north on Merchant Street. A
Gazette carrier passed— a High School boy friend—
and she waved at him, but with her bridle hand; the
horse veered quickly, plunged into the parking where
the low-hanging limb faced her, and, while she still
looked back waving, the blow came. But she did not
fall from the horse; she slipped off, dazed a bit,

24 William Allen White

staggered and fell in a faint. She never quite re-
covered consciousness.

But she did not fall from the horse, neither was she
riding fast. A year or so ago she used to go like the
wind. But that habit was broken, and she used the
horse to get into the open to get fresh, hard exercise,
and to work off a certain surplus energy that welled
up in her and needed a physical outlet. That need has
been in her heart for years. It was back of the impulse
that kept the dauntless, little brown-clad figure on the
streets and country roads of this community and built
into a strong, muscular body what had been a frail
and sickly frame during the first years of her life.
But the riding gave her more than a body. It released
a gay and hardy soul. She was the happiest thing in
the world. And she was happy because she was en-
larging her horizon. She came to know all sorts and
conditions of men; Charley O'Brien, the traffic cop,
was one of her best friends. W. L. Holtz, the Latin
teacher, was another. Tom O'Connor, farmer-poli-
tician, and Rev. J. H. J. Rice, preacher and police
judge, and Frank Beach, music master, were her spe-
cial friends, and all the girls, black and white, above
the track and below the track, in Pepville and String-
town, were among her acquaintances. And she brought
home riotous stories of her adventures. She loved to
rollick ; persiflage was her natural expression at home.

Mary White 25

Her humor was a continual bubble of joy. She seemed
to think in hyperbole and metaphor. She was mis-
chievous wtihout malice, as full of faults as an old
shoe. No angel was Mary White, but an easy girl to
live with, for she never nursed a grouch five minutes
in her life.

With all her eagerness for the out-of-doors, she
loved books. On her table when she left her room
were a book by Conrad, one by Galsworthy, "Creative
Chemistry" by E. E. Slosson, and a Kipling book. She
read Mark Twain, Dickens and KipHng before she was
ten — all of their writings. Wells and Arnold Ben-
nett particularly amused and diverted her. She was
entered as a student in Wellesley in 1922; was assis-
tant editor of the High School Annual this year, and
in line for election to the editorship of the Annual
next year. She was a member of the executive com-
mittee of the High School Y. W. C. A.

Within the last two years she had begun to be moved
by an ambition to draw. She began as most children
do by scribbling in her school books, funny pictures.
She bought cartoon magazines and took a course — ^
rather casually, naturally, for she was, after all, a
child with no strong purposes — and this year she tasted
the first fruits of success by having her pictures ac-
cepted by the High School Annual. But the thrill of
delight she got when Mr. Ecord, of the Normal An-

26 William Allen White

nual, asked her to do the cartooning for that book this
spring, was too beautiful for words. She fell to her
work with all her enthusiastic heart. Her drawings
were accepted, and her pride — always repressed by a
lively sense of the ridiculousness of the figure she was
cutting — was a really gorgeous thing to see. No suc-
cessful artist ever drank a deeper draught of satisfac-
tion than she took from the little fame her work was
getting among her schoolfellows. In her glory, she
almost forgot her horse — but never her car.

For she used the car as a jitney bus. It was her
social life. She never had a ''party" in all her nearly
seventeen years — wouldn't have one; but she never
drove a block in the car in her life that she didn't begin
to fill the car with pick-ups! Everybody rode with
Mary White — white and black, old and young, rich
and poor, men and women. She liked nothing better
than to fill the car full of long-legged High School
boys and an occasional girl, and parade the town. She
never had a ''date," nor went to a dance, except once
with her brother. Bill, and the "boy proposition" didn't
interest her — yet. But young people — great spring-
breaking, varnish-cracking, fender-bending, door-
sagging carloads of "kids" gave her great pleasure.
Her zests were keen. But the most fun she ever had
in her life was acting as chairman of the committee
that got up the big turkey dinner for the poor folkb

Mary White 27

at the county home; scores of pies, gallons of slaw;
jam, cakes, preserves, oranges and a wilderness of tur-
key were loaded in the car and taken to the county
home. And, being of a practical turn of mind, she
risked her own Christmas dinner by staying to see that
the poor folks actually got it all. Not that she was a
cynic; she just disliked to tempt folks. While there
she found a blind colored uncle, very old, who could
do nothing but make rag rugs, and she rustled up from
her school friends rags enough to keep him busy for a
season. The last engagement she tried to make was
to take the guests at the county home out for a car
ride. And the last endeavor of her life was to try to
get a rest room for colored girls in the High School.
She found one girl reading in the toilet, because there
was no better place for a colored girl to loaf, and it
inflamed her sense of injustice and she became a
nagging harpie to those who, she thought, could
remedy the evil. The poor she had always with her,
and was glad of it. She hungered and thirsted for
righteousness; and was the most impious creature in
the world. She joined the Congregational Church with-
out consulting her parents; not particularly for her
soul's good. She never had a thrill of piety in her
life, and would have hooted at a ''testimony.'' But
even as a little child she felt the church was an agency
for helping people to more of life's abundance, and she

28 Will lain Allen White

wanted to help. She never wanted help for herself.
Clothes meant little to her. It was a fight to get a
new rig on her; but eventually a harder fight to get it
off. She never wore a jewel and had no ring but her
High School class ring, and never asked for anything
but a wrist watch. She refused to have her hair up;
though she was nearly seventeen. "Mother/' she pro-
tested, ''you don't know how much I get by with, in my
braided pigtails, that I could not with my hair up."
Above every other passion of her life was her passion
not to grow up, to be a child. The tom-boy in her.
which was big, seemed to loathe to be put away for-
ever in skirts. She was a Peter Pan, who refused to
grow up.

Her funeral yesterday at the Congregational Church
was as she would have wished it ; no singing, no flowers
save the big bunch of red roses from her Brother Bill's
Harvard classmen — Heavens, how proud that would
have made her! and the red roses from the Gazette
force — in vases at her head and feet. A short prayer,
Paul's beautiful essay on *'Love" from the Thirteenth
Chapter of First Corinthians, some remarks about her
democratic spirit by her friend, John H. J. Rice, pastQ**
and police judge, which she would have deprecated if
she could, a prayer sent down for her by her friend,
Carl Nau, and opening the service the slow, poignant
movement from Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, which

Mary White 29

she loved, and closing the service a cutting from the
joyously melancholy first movement of Tschaikowski's
Pathetic Symphony, which she liked to hear in certain
moods on the phonograph ; then the Lord's Prayer by
her friends in the High School.

That was all.

For her pall-bearers only her friends were chosen:
her Latin teacher — W. L. Holtz ; her High School prin-
cipal. Rice Brown; her doctor, Frank Foncannon; her
friend, W. W. Finney; her pal at the Gazette office,
Walter Hughes; and her brother Bill. It would have
made her smile to know that her friend, Charley
O'Brien, the traffic cop, had been transferred from
Sixth and Commercial to the corner near the church
to direct her friends who came to bid her good-by.

A rift in the clouds in a gray day threw a shaft of
sunlight upon her coffin as her nervous, energetic little
body sank to its last sleep. But the soul of her, the
glowing, gorgeous, fervent soul of her, surely was
flaming in eager joy upon some other dawn.

NIAGARA FALLS
By Rupert Brooke

The poet usually is the best reporter, for he is an observer not
merely accurate but imaginative, self-trained to see subtle sug-
gestions, relations and similarities. This magnificent bit of de-
scription was written by Rupert Brooke as one of the letters
sent to the Westminster Gazette describing his trip in the United
States and Canada in 1913. It is included in the volume Letters
from Aynerica to which Henry James contributed so affectionate
and desperately unintelligible a preface— one of the last things
James wrote. Brooke's notes on America are well worth read-
ing: they are full of delightful and lively comments, though
sometimes much (oh, very much!) too condescending. The last
paragraph in this essay is interesting in view of subsequent
history.

Brooke was born in 1887, son of a master at Rugby School;
was at King's College, Cambridge ; died of blood-poisoning in
the iEgean, April 23, 1915.

Samuel Butler has a lot to answer for. But for
him, a modern traveler could spend his time peacefully
admiring the scenery instead of feeling himself bound
to dog the simple and grotesque of the world for the
sake of their too-human comments. It is his fault if
a peasant's naivete has come to outweigh the beauty
of rivers, and the remarks of clergymen are more
than mountains. It is very restful to give up all effort
at observing human nature and drawing social and
political deductions from trifles, and to let oneself
relapse into wide-mouthed worship of the wonders of
nature. And this is very easy at Niagara. Niagara

JO

Niagara Falls 31

means nothing. It is not leading anywhere. It does
not result from anything. It throws no light on the
effects of Protection, nor on the Facility for Divorce
in America, nor on Corruption in Public Life, nor on
Canadian character, nor even on the Navy Bill. It is
merely a great deal of water falling over some cliffs.
But it is very remarkably that. The human race, apt
as a child to destroy what it admires, has done its best
to surround the Falls with every distraction, incon-
gruity, and vulgarity. Hotels, powerhouses, bridges,
trams, picture post-cards, sham legends, stalls, booths,
rifle-galleries, and side-shows frame them about. And
there are Touts. Niagara is the central home and
breeding-place for all the touts of earth. There are
touts insinuating, and touts raucous, greasy touts,
brazen touts, and upper-class, refined, gentlemanly,
take-you-by-the-arm touts; touts who intimidate and
touts who wheedle; professionals, amateurs, and dilet-
tanti, male and female; touts who would photograph
you with your arm round a young lady against a
faked background of the sublimest cataract, touts who
vi^ould bully you into cars, char-a-bancs, elevators, or
tunnels, or deceive you into a carriage and pair, touts
who would sell you picture post-cards, moccasins, sham
Indian beadwork, blankets, tee-pees, and crockery, and
touts, finally, who have no apparent object in the
world, but just purely, simply, merely, incessantly, in-

32 Rupert Brooke

defatigably, and ineffugibly to tout. And in the midst
of all this, overwhelming it all, are the Falls. He
who sees them instantly forgets humanity. They are
not very high, but they are overpowering. They are
divided by an island into two parts, the Canadian and
the American.

Half a mile or so above the Falls, on either side, the
water of the great stream begins to run more swiftly
and in confusion. It descends with ever-growing
speed. It begins chattering and leaping, breaking into
a thousand ripples, throwing up joyful fingers of spray.
Sometimes it is divided by islands and rocks, some-
times the eye can see nothing but a waste of laughing,
springing, foamy waves, turning, crossing, even seem-
ing to stand for an instant erect, but always borne im-
petuously forward like a crowd of triumphant feasters.
Sit close down by it, and you see a fragment of the
torrent against the sky, mottled, steely, and foaming,
leaping onward in far-flung criss-cross strands of
water. Perpetually the eye is on the point of descry-
ing a pattern in this weaving, and perpetually it is
cheated by change. In one place part of the flood
plunges over a ledge a few feet high and a quarter of a
mile or so long, in a uniform and stable curve. It gives
an impression of almost military concerted movement,
grown suddenly out of confusion. But it is swiftly
lost again in the multitudinous tossing merriment.

Niagara Falls 33

Here and there a rock close to the surface is marked
by a white wave that faces backwards and seems to be
rushing madly up-stream, but is really stationary in
the headlong charge. But for these signs of reluct-
ance, the waters seem to fling themselves on with some
foreknowledge of their fate, in an ever wilder frenzy.
But it is no Maeterlinckian prescience. They prove,
rather, that Greek belief that the great crashes are
preceded by a louder merriment and a wilder gaiety.
Leaping in the sunlight, careless, entwining, clam-
orously joyful, the waves riot on towards the
verge.

But there they change. As they turn to the sheer
descent, the white and blue and slate color, in the heart
of the Canadian Falls at least, blend and deepen to a
rich, wonderful, luminous green. On the edge of dis-
aster the river seems to gather herself, to pause, to
lift a head noble in ruin, and then, with a slow
grandeur, to plunge into the eternal thunder and white
chaos below. Where the stream runs shallower it is
a kind of violet color, but both violet and green fray
and frill to white as they fall. The mass of water,
striking some ever-hidden base of rock, leaps up the
whole two hundred feet again in pinnacles and domes
of spray. The spray falls back into the lower river
once more ; all but a little that fines to foam and white
mist, which drifts in layers along the air, graining it,

34 Rupert Brooke

and wanders out on the wind over the trees and gar-
dens and houses, and so vanishes.

The manager of one of the great power-stations
on the banks of the river above the Falls told me that
the center of the riverbed at the Canadian Falls is
deep and of a saucer shape. So it may be possible to
fill this up to a uniform depth, and divert a lot of water
for the power-houses. And this, he said, would supply
the need for more power, which will certainly soon
arise, without taking away from the beauty of Niagara.
This is a handsome concession of the utilitarians to
ordinary sight-seers. Yet, I doubt if we shall be satis-
fied. The real secret of the beauty and terror of the
Falls is not their height or width, but the feeling of
colossal power and of unintelligible disaster caused by
the plunge of that vast body of water. If that were
taken away, there would be litde visible change, but
the heart would be gone.

The American Falls do not inspire this feeling in
the same way as the Canadian. It is because they are
less in volume, and because the water does not fall so
much into one place. By comparison their beauty is
almost delicate and fragile. They are extraordinarily
level, one long curtain of lacework and woven foam.
Seen from opposite, when the sun is on them, they
are blindingly white, and the clouds of spray show
dark against them. With both Falls the color of the

Niagara Falls 35

water is the ever-altering wonder. Greens and blues,
purples and whites, melt into one another, fade, and
come again, and change with the changing sun. Some-
times they are as richly diaphanous as a precious stone,
and glow from within with a deep, inexplicable light.
Sometimes the white intricacies of dropping foam be-
come opaque and creamy. And always there are the
rainbows. If you come suddenly upon the Falls from
above, a great double rainbow, very vivid, spanning
the extent of spray from top to bottom, is the first
thing you see. If you wander along the cliff opposite, a
bow springs into being in the American Falls, accom-
panies you courteously on your walk, dwindles and dies
as the mist ends, and awakens again as you reach the
Canadian tumult. And the bold traveler who attempts
the trip under the American Falls sees, when he dare
open his eyes to anything, tiny baby rainbows, some
four or five yards in span, leaping from rock to rock
among the foam, and gamboling beside him, barely
out of hand's reach, as he goes. One I saw in that
place was a complete circle, such as I have never seen
before, and so near that I could put my foot on it. It
is a terrifying journey, beneath and behind the Falls.
The senses are battered and bewildered by the thunder
of the water and the assault of wind and spray; or
rather, the sound is not of falling water, but merely
of falling; a noise of unspecified ruin. So, if you are

36 Rupert Brooke

close behind the endless clamor, the sight cannot recog-
nize liquid in the masses that hurl past. You are dimly
and pitifully aware that sheets of light and darkness
are falling in great curves in front of you. Dull
omnipresent foam washes the face. Farther away, in
the roar and hissing, clouds of spray seem literally tc
slide down some invisible plane of air.

Beyond the foot of the Falls the river is like a
slipping floor of marble, green with veins of dirty
white, made by the scum that was foam. It slides very
quietly and slowly down for a mile or two, sullenly
exhausted. Then it turns to a dull sage green, and
hurries more swiftly, smooth and omnious. As the
walls of the ravine close in, trouble stirs, and the
waters boil and eddy. These are the lower rapids, a
sight more terrifying than the Falls, because less in-
telligible. Close in its bands of rock the river surges
tumultuously forward, writhing and leaping as if in-
spired by a demon. It is pressed by the straits into a
visibly convex form. Great planes of water slide
past. Sometimes it is thrown up into a pinnacle of
foam higher than a house, or leaps wnth incredible
speed from the crest of one vast w^ave to another, along
the shining curve between, like the spring of a wild
beast. Its motion continually suggests muscular ac-
tion. The power manifest in these rapids moves one
wnth a different sense of awe and terror from that of

Niagara Falls oy

the Falls. Here the inhuman life and strength are
spontaneous, active, almost resolute; masculine vigor
compared with the passive gigantic power, female, help-
less and overwhelming, of the Falls. A place of fear.
One is drawn back, strangely, to a contemplation of
the Falls, at every hour, and especially by night, when
the cloud of spray becomes an immense visible ghost,
straining and wavering high above the river, white and
pathetic and translucent. The Victorian lies very close
below the surface in every man. There one can sit
and let great cloudy thoughts of destiny and the pas-
sage of empires drift through the mind; for such
dreams are at home by Niagara. I could not get out
of my mind the thought of a friend, who said that the
rainbows over the Falls were like the arts and beauty
and goodness, with regard to the stream of life-
caused by it, thrown upon its spray, but unable to stay
or direct or affect it, and ceasing when it ceased. In
all comparisons that rise in the heart, the river, with
its multitudinous waves and its single current, likens
Itself to a life, whether of an individual or of a com-
munity. A man's life is of many flashing moments,
and yet one stream; a nation's flows through all its
citizens, and yet is more than they. In such places, one
is aware, with an almost insupportable and yet com-
forting certitude, that both men and nations are hur-
ried onwards to their ruin or ending as inevitably as

38 Rupert Brooke

this dark flood. Some go down to it unreluctant, and
meet it, like the river, not without nobility. And as
incessant, as inevitable, and as unavailing as the spray
that hangs over the Falls, is the white cloud of human
crying. . . . With some such thoughts does the plati-
tudinous heart win from the confusion and thunder
of a Niagara peace that the quietest plains or most
stable hills can never give.

THE ALMOST PERFECT STATE
By Don Marquis

Don Marquis is a real name, not a pseudonym ; it is pronounced
Markin'iss, not Markee. I reprint here two of Mr. Marquis's
amiable meditations on the "Almost Perfect State," which have
appeared in the column {The Sun Dial) conducted by him for
ten years in the New York Sun. According to the traditional
motto of sun-dials, Mr. Marquis's horologe usually numbers
only the serene hours ; but sometimes, when the clear moonlight
of his Muse is shining, it casts darker and even more precious
shadows of satire and mysticism. His many readers know by
this time the depth and reach of his fun and fancy. Marquis
is a true philosopher and wit, his humor adorns a rich and
mellow gravity. When strongly moved he sometimes utters an
epigram that rings like steel leaving the scabbard.

There are many things to be said against American news-
papers, but much of the indictment is quashed when one con-
siders that every now and then they develop a writer like Don
Marquis. The violent haste, pressure and instancy of newspaper
routine, purgatorial to some temperaments, is a genuine stimulus
to others — particularly if they are able, as in the case of the
columnist, to fall back upon outside contributors in their inter-
vals of pessimism or sloth.

Mr. Marquis's The Old Soak, a post-prohibition portrait of a
genial old tippler, is perhaps the most vital bit of American
humor since Mr. Dooley — some say since Mark Twain. His
Prefaces and his poems will also be considered by the judicious.
He was born in Illinois in 1878, and did newspaper work in
Philadelphia and Atlanta before coming to the Sun in 1912.

I

No matter how nearly perfect an Almost Perfect
State may be, it is not nearly enough perfect unless the
individuals who compose it can, somewhere between
death and birth, have a perfectly corking time for a
few years. The most wonderful governmental system

39

40 Don Marquis

in the world does not attract us, as a system; we are
after a system that scarcely knows it is a system; the
great thing is to have the largest number of individuals
as happy as may be, for a little while at least, some
time before they die.

Infancy is not what it is cracked up to be. The
child seems happy all the time to the adult, because
the adult knows that the child is untouched by the real
problems of life; if the adult were similarly untouched
he is sure that he would be happy. But children, not
knowing that they are having an easy time, have a
good many hard times. Growing and learning and
obeying the rules of their elders, or fighting against
them, are not easy things to do. Adolescence is cer-
tainly far from a uniformly pleasant period. Early
manhood might be the most glorious time of all were
it not that the sheer excess of life and vigor gets a
fellow into continual scrapes. Of middle age the best
that can be said is that a middle aged person has likely
learned how to have a little fun in spite of his troubles.

It is to old age that we look for reimbursement, the
most of us. And most of us look in vain. For the
most of us have been wrenched and racked, in one way
or another, until old age is the most trying time of all.

In the Almost Perfect State every person shall have
at least ten years before he dies of easy, carefree,
happy living . . . thing^s will be so arranged economi*

The Almost Perfect State 41

cally that this will be possible for each individual.

Personally we look forward to an old age of dissi-
pation and indolence and unreverend disrepute. In
fifty years we shall be ninety-two years old. We in-
tend to work rather hard during those fifty years and
accumulate enough to live on without working any
more for the next ten years, for we have determined
to die at the age of one hundred and two.

During the last ten years we shall indulge ourself
in many things that we have been forced by circum-
'stances to forego. We have always been compelled,
and we shall be compelled for many years to come, to
be prudent, cautious, staid, sober, conservative, indus-
trious, respectful of established institutions, a model
citizen. We have not liked it, but we have been unable
to escape it. Our mind, our logical faculties, our ob-
servation, inform us that the conservatives have the
right side of the argument in all human affairs. But
the people whom we really prefer as associates, though
we do not approve their ideas, are the rebels, the radi-
cals, the wastrels, the vicious, the poets, the Bolshevists,
the idealists, the nuts, the Lucifers, the agreeable good-
for-nothings, the sentimentalists, the prophets, the
freaks. We have never dared to know any of them,
far less become intimate with them.

Between the years of ninety-two and a hundred and
two, however, we shall be the ribald, useless, drunken

42 Don Marquis

outcast person we have always wished to be. We shall
have a long white beard and long white hair; we shall
not walk at all, but recline in a wheel chair and bellow
for alcoholic beverages; in the winter we shall sit be-
fore the fire with our feet in a bucket of hot water,
with a decanter of corn whiskey near at hand, and write
ribald songs against organized society; strapped to
one arm of our chair will be a forty-five caliber re-
volver, and we shall shoot out the lights when we
want to go to sleep, instead of turning them off ; when
we want air we shall throw a silver candlestick through
the front window and be damned to it; we shall ad-
dress public meetings to which we have been invited
because of our wisdom in a vein of jocund malice.
We shall . . . but we don't wish to make any one
envious of the good time that is coming to us . . .we
look forward to a disreputable, vigorous, unhonored
and disorderly old age.

(In the meantime, of course, you understand, you
can't have us pinched and deported for our yearn-
ings.)

We shall know that the Almost Perfect State is here
when the kind of old age each person wants is possible
to him. Of course, all of you may not want the kind
we want . . . some of you may prefer prunes and
morality to the bitter end. Some of you may be dis-
solute now and may look forward to becoming like

The Almost Perfect State 43

one of the nice old fellows in a Wordsworth poem.
'But for our part we have always been a hypocrite and
we shall have to continue being a hypocrite for a good
many years yet, and we yearn to come out in our true
colors at last. The point is, that no matter what you
want to be, during those last ten years, that you may
be, in the Almost Perfect State.

Any system of government under which the indi-
vidual does all the sacrificing for the sake of the gen-
eral good, for the sake of the community, the State,
gets off on its wrong foot. We don't want things that
cost us too much. We don't want too much strain all
the time.

The best good that you can possibly achieve is not
good enough if you have to strain yourself all the
time to reach it. A thing is only worth doing, and
doing again and again, if you can do it rather easily,
and get some joy out of it.

Do the best you can, without straining yourself toe
much and too continuously, and leave the rest to God.
If you strain yourself too much you'll have to ask Goc}
to patch you up. And for all you know, patching
you up may take time that it was planned to use some
other way.

BUT . . . overstrain yourself now and then. For
this reason : The things you create easily and joyously
will not continue to come easily and joyously unless

44 Don Marquis

you yourself are getting bigger all the time. And
when you overstrain yourself you are assisting in the
creation of a new self — if you get what we mean. And
if you should ask us suddenly just what this has to do
with the picture of the old guy in the wheel chair we
should answer: Hanged if we know, but we seemed
to sort o' run into it, somehow.

II

Interplanetary communication is one of the persist-
ent dreams of the inhabitants of this oblate spheroid
on which we move, breathe and suffer for lack of beer.
There seems to be a feeling in many quarters that if
we could get speech with the Martians, let us say, we
might learn from them something to our advantage.
There is a disposition to concede the superiority of the
fellows Out There . . . just as some Americans
capitulate without a struggle to poets from England,
rugs from Constantinople, song and sausage from Ger-
many, religious enthusiasts from Hindustan and cheese
from Switzerland, although they have not tested the
goods offered and really lack the discrimination to de-
termine their quality. Almost the only foreign im-
portations that were ever sneezed at in this country
were Swedish matches and Spanish influenza.

But are the Martians ... if Martians there be
. . . any more capable than the persons dwelling be-

The Almost Perfect State 45

tween the Woolworth Building and the Golden Horn,
between Shwe Dagon and the First Church, Scientist,
in Boston, Mass.? Perhaps the Martians yearn to-
ward earth, romantically, poetically, the Romeos swear-
ing by its light to the Juliets ; the idealists and philoso-
phers fabling that already there exists upon it an
ALMOST PERFECT STATE — and now and then a wan
prophet lifting his heart to its gleams, as a cup to be
filled from Heaven with fresh waters of hope and
courage. For this earth, it is also a star.

We know they are wrong about us, the lovers in
the far stars, the philosophers, poets, the prophets . . .
or are they wrong?

They are both right and wrong, as we are probably
both right and wrong about them. If we tumbled into
Mars or Arcturus or Sirlus this evening wx should find
the people there discussing the shimmy, the jazz, the
inconstancy of cooks and the iniquity of retail butchers,
no doubt . . . and they would be equally disappointed
by the way we flitter, frivol, flutter and flivver.

And yet, that other thing would be there too . . .
that thing that made them look at our star as a sym-
bol of grace and beauty.

Men could not think of the almost perfect state
if they did not have it in them ultimately to create the
almost perfect state.

We used sometimes to walk over the Brookl}Ti

46 Don Marquis

Bridge, that song in stone and steel of an engineer who
was also a great artist, at dusk, when the tides of
shadow flood in from the lower bay to break in a
surf of glory and mystery and illusion against the tall
towers of Manhattan. Seen from the middle arch of
the bridge at twilight. New York with its girdle of
shifting waters and its drift of purple cloud and its
quick pulsations of unstable light is a miracle of
splendor and beauty that lights up the heart like the
laughter of a god.

But, descend. Go down into the city. Mingle with
the details. The dirty old shed from which the "L"
trains and trolleys put out with their jammed and
mangled thousands for flattest Flatbush and the un-
known bourne of ulterior Brooklyn is still the same
dirty old shed; on a hot, damp night the pasty streets
stink like a paperhanger's overalls; you are trodden
and over-ridden by greasy little profiteers and their
hopping victims ; you are encompassed round about by
the ugly and the sordid, and the objectionable is ex-
uded upon you from a myriad candid pores; your
elation and your illusion vanish like ingenuous snow-
flakes that have kissed a hot dog sandwich on its fiery
brow, and you say: ''Beauty? Aw, h — 11 What's
the use?"

And yet you have seen beauty. And beauty that was
created by these people and people like these. . . . You

The Almost Perfect State 47

have seen the tall towers of Manhattan, wonderful
under the stars. How did it come about that such
growths came from such soil — that a breed lawless
and sordid and prosaic has written such a mighty hiero-
glyphic against the sky? This glamor out of a pigsty
. . . how come? How is it that this hideous, half-
brute city is also beautiful and a fit habitation for
demi-gods? How come?

It comes about because the wise and subtle deities
permit nothing worthy to be lost. It was with no
thought of beauty that the builders labored; no con-
scious thought ; they were masters or slaves in the bitter
wars of commerce, and they never saw as a whole
what they were making; no one of them did. But each
one had had his dream. And the baffled dreams and
the broken visions and the ruined hopes and the secret
desires of each one labored with him as he labored;
the things that were lost and beaten and trampled
down went into the stone and steel and gave it soul:
the aspiration denied and the hope abandoned and the
vision defeated were the things that lived, and not the
apparent purpose for which each one of all the millions
sweat and toiled or cheated; the hidden things, the
silent things, the winged things, so weak they are
easily killed, the unacknowledged things, the rejected
beauty, the strangled appreciation, the inchoate art, the
submerged spirit — these groped and found each other

48 Don Marquis

and gathered themselves together and worked them-
selves into the tiles and mortar of the edifice and made
a town that is a worthy fellow of the sunrise and the
sea winds.

Humanity triumphs over its details.

The individual aspiration is always defeated of its
perfect fruition and expression, but it is never lost;
it passes into the conglomerate being of the race.

The way to encourage yourself about the human
race is to look at it first from a distance; look at the
lights on the high spots. Coming closer, you will
be profoundly discouraged at the number of low spots,
not to say two-spots. Coming still closer, you will
become discouraged once more by the reflection that
the same stuff that is in the high spots is also in the
two-spots.

"THE MAN-O'-WAR'S *ER 'USBAND*^
By David W. Bone

Those who understand something of a sailor's feeling for his
ship will appreciate the restraint with which Captain Bone de-
scribes the loss of the Cameronia, his command, torpedoed in
the Mediterranean during the War. You will notice (forgive
us for pointing out these things) how quietly the quoted title
pays tribute to the gallantry of the destroyers that stood by the
sinking ship; and the heroism of the chief officer's death is not
less moving because told in two sentences. This superb picture
of a sea tragedy is taken from Merchanfmen-at^Arms, a history
of the British Merchants' Service during the War; a book of
enthralling power and truth, illustrated by the author's brother,
Muirhead Bone, one of the greatest of living etchers.

David William Bone was born in Partick (near Glasgow)
in 1873; his father was a well-known Glasgow journalist; his
great-grandfather was a boyhood companion of Robert Bums.
Bone went to sea as an apprentice in the City of Florence, an
old-time square-rigger, at the age of fifteen ; he has been at
sea ever since. He is now master of S.S. Columbia of the
Anchor Line, a well-known ship in New York Harbor, as she
has carried passengers between the Clyde and the Hudson for
more than twenty years. Captain Bone's fine sea tale. The Brass-
bounder, published in 1910, has become a classic of the square-
sail era; his Broken Stozvage (1915) is a collection of shorter
sea sketches. In the long roll of great writers who have re-
flected the simplicity and severity of sea life, Captain Bone
will take a permanent and honorable place.

A SENSE of security is difficult of definition. Largely,
It is founded upon habit and association. It is induced
and maintained by familiar surroundings. On board
ship, in a small world of our own, we seem to be
contained by the boundaries of the bulwarks, to be
sailing beyond the influences of the land and of other
ships. The sea is the same we have known for so

49

50 David W , Bone

long. Every item of our ship fitment — the trim ar-
rangement of the decks, the set and rake of mast and
funnel, even the furnishings of our cabin? — has the
power of impressing a stable feeling of custom, nor-
mal ship life, safety. It requires an effort of thought
to recall that in their homely presence we are endan-
gered. Relating his experiences after having been
mined and his ship sunk, a master confided that the
point that impressed him most deeply was when he
went to his room for the confidential papers and saw
the cabin exactly in everyday aspect — his longshore
clothes suspended from the hooks, his umbrella stand-
ing in a corner as he had placed it on coming aboard.

Soldiers on service are denied this aid to assur-
ance. Unlike us, they cannot carry their home with
them to the battlefields. All their scenes and sur-
roundings are novel; they may only draw a reliance
and comfort from the familiar presence of their com-
rades. At sea in a ship there is a yet greater incite-
ment to their disquiet. The movement, the limitless
sea, the distance from the land, cannot be ignored.
The atmosphere that is so familiar and comforting
to us, is to many of them an environment of dread
possibilities.

It is with some small measure of this sense of secu-
rity— tempered by our knowledge of enemy activity
in these waters — we pace the bridge. .Anxiety is not

''The Man-o'-War's 'Er 'Vsband'' 51

wholly absent. Some hours past, we saw small flot-
sam that may have come from the decks of a French
mail steamer, torpedoed three days ago. The passing
of the derelict fittings aroused some disquiet, but the
steady routine of our progress and the constant friendly
presence of familiar surroundings has effect in allay-
ing immediate fears. The rounds of the bridge go on
— the writing of the log, the tapping of the glass, the
small measures that mark the passing of our sea-hours.
Two days out from Marseilles — and all well! In
another two days we should be approaching the Canal,
and then — to be clear of 'submarine waters' for a
term. Fine weather! A light wind and sea accom-
pany us for the present, but the filmy glare of the sun,
now low, and a backward movement of the glass fore-
tells a break ere long. We are steaming at high speed
to make the most of the smooth sea. Ahead, on each
bow, our two escorting destroyers conform to the
angles of our zigzag — spurring out and swerving with
the peculiar ''thrown-around" movement of their class.
Look-out is alert and in numbers. Added to the watch
of the ship's crew, military signalers are posted; the
boats swung outboard have each a party of troops on
guard.

An alarmed cry from aloft — a half -uttered order
to the steersman — an explosion, low down in the bowels
of the ship, that sets her reeling in her stride !

52 David W. Bone

The upthrow comes swiftly on the moment of im-
pact. Hatches, coal, a huge column of solid water go
skyward in a hurtling mass to fall in torrent on the
bridge. Part of a human body strikes the awning
spars and hangs — watch-keepers are borne to the deck
by the weight of water — the steersman falls limply
over the wheel with blood pouring from a gash on his
forehead. . . . Then silence for a stunned half-minute,
with only the thrust of the engines marking the heart-
beats of the stricken ship.

Uproar! Most of our men are young recruits',
they have been but two days on the sea. The tor-
pedo has gone hard home at the very weakest hour
of our calculated drill. The troops are at their even-
ing meal when the blow comes, the explosion killing
many outright. We had counted on a proportion of
the troops being on the deck, a steadying number to
balance the sudden rush from below that we foresaw
in emergency. Hurrying from the mess-decks as en-
joined, the quick movement gathers way and intensity :
the decks become jammed by the pressure, the gang-
ways and passages are blocked in the struggle. There
is the making of a panic — tuned by their outcry, *'God!
0 God! O Christ!" The swelling murmur is neither
excited nor agonized — rather the dull, hopeless expres-
sion of despair.

The officer commanding troops has come on the

tf

The Man-o'-Wa/s 'Er 'Usband'' 53

bridge at the first alarm. His juniors have oppor-
tunity to take their stations before the strugghng mass
reaches to the boats. The impossibiHty of getting
among the men on the lower decks makes the mili-
tary officers' efforts to restore confidence difficult.
They are aided from an unexpected quarter. The
bridge-boy makes unofficial use of our megaphone.
*'Hey! Steady up you men doon therr," he shouts.
'^Ye'll no' dae ony guid fur yersels croodin' th' led-
ders!"

We could not have done it as well. The lad is
plainly in sight to the crowd on the decks. A small
boy, undersized. "Steady up doon therr !" The effect
is instant. Noise there still is, but the movement is
arrested.

The engines are stopped — we are now beyond range
of a second torpedo — and steam thunders in exhaust,
making our efforts to control movements by voice im-
possible. At the moment of the impact the destroyers
have swung round and are casting here and there
like hounds on the scent: the dull explosion of a
depth-charge — then another, rouses a fierce hope that
we are not unavenged. The force of the explosion has
broken connections to the wireless room, but the aerial
still holds and, when a measure of order on the boat-
deck allows, we send a message of our peril broadcast
There is no doubt in our minds of the outcome. Our

54 David TV, Bone

bows, drooping visibly, tell that we shall not float long.
We have nearly three thousand on board. There are
boats for sixteen hundred — then rafts. Boats — rafts
— and the glass is falling at a rate that shows bad
weather over the western horizon !

Our drill, that provided for lowering the boats with
only half-complements in them, w^ill not serve. We
pass orders to lower away in any condition, however
overcrowded. The way is off the ship, and it is with
some apprehension we watch the packed boats that
drop away from the davit heads. The shrill ring of
the block-sheaves indicates a tension that is not far
from breaking-point. Many of the life-boats reach
the water safely with their heavy burdens, but the
strain on the tackles — far beyond their working load
— is too great for all to stand to it. Two boats go
down by the run. The men in them are thrown vio-
lently to the water, where they float in the wash and
shattered planking. A third dangles from the after
fall, having shot her manning out at parting of the
forward tackle. Lowered by the stern, she rights,
disengages, and drifts aft with the men clinging to
the life-lines. We can make no attempt to reach the
men in the water. Their life-belts are sufficient to
keep them affoat : the ship is going down rapidly by
the head, and there remains the second line of boats
to be hoisted and swung over. The chief officer, paus-

''The Man-o'-War's 'Er 'Usband'' 55

ing in his quick work, looks to the bridge inquiringly,
as though to ask, "How long?" The fingers of two
hands suffice to mark our estimate.

The decks are now angled to the deepening pitch
of the bows. Pumps are utterly inadequate to make
impression on the swift inflow. The chief engineer
comes to the bridge with a hopeless report. It is only
a question of time. How long? Already the water
is lapping at a level of the foredeck. Troops massed
there and on the forecastle-head are apprehensive: it
is indeed a wonder that their officers have held them for
so long. The commanding officer sets example by a
cool nonchalance that we envy. Posted with us on the
bridge, his quick eyes note the flood surging in the
pent 'tween-decks below, from which his men have
removed the few wounded. The dead are left to the
sea.

Help comes as we had expected it would. Leaving
Nemesis to steam fast circles round the sinking
ship, Rifleman swings in and brings up alongside
at the forward end. Even in our fear and anxiety
and distress, we cannot but admire the precision of
the destroyer captain's manoeuver — the skilful avoid-
ance of our crowded life-boats and the men in the
water — the sudden stoppage of her way and the cant
that brings her to a standstill at the lip of our brim-
ming decks. The troops who have stood so well to

56 David W. Bone

orders have their reward in an easy leap to safety.
Quickly the foredeck is cleared. Rifleman spurts
ahead in a rush that sets the surrounding life-boats to
eddy in her wash. She takes up the circling high-
speed patrol and allows her sister ship to swing in
and embark a -number of our men.

It is when the most of the life-boats are gone we
realize fully the gallant service of the destroyers. There
remain the rafts, but many of these have been launched
over to aid the struggling men in the water. Half
an hour has passed since we were struck — thirty min-
utes of frantic endeavor to debark our men — yet
still the decks are thronged by a packed mass that
seems but little reduced. The coming of the destroyers
alters the outlook. Rifleman's action has taken over
six hundred. A sensible clearance! Nemesis swings
in with the precision of an express, and the thud and
clatter of the troops jumping to her deck sets up a
continuous drumming note of deliverance. Alert and
confident, the naval men accept the great risks of their
position. The ship*s bows are entered to the water
at a steep incline. Every minute the balance is weigh-
ing, casting her stern high in the air. The bulkheads
are by now taking place of keel and bearing the huge
weight of her on the water. At any moment she may
go without a warning, to crash into the light hull of
the destroyer and bear her down. For all the circling

''The Man-o'-War's 'Er 'Usband'' 57

watch of her sister ship, the submarine — if still he
lives — may get in a shot at the standing target. It is
with a deep relief we signal the captain to bear off.
Her decks are jammed to the limit. She can carry
no more. Nemesis lists heavily under her burdened
decks as she goes ahead and clears.

Forty minutes! The zigzag clock in the wheel-
house goes on ringing the angles of time and course
as though we were yet under helm and speed. For
a short term we have noted that the ship appears to
have reached a point of arrest in her foundering
droop. She remains upright as she has been since
righting herself after the first inrush of water. Like
the lady she always was, she has added no fearsome
list to the sum of our distress. The familiar bridge,
on which so many of our safe sea-days have been
spent, is canted at an angle that makes foothold un-
easy. She cannot remain for long afloat. The end
will come swiftly, without warning — a sudden rup-
ture of the bulkhead that is sustaining her weight.
We are not now many left on board. Striving and
wrenching to man-handle the only remaining boat —
rendered idle for want of the tackles that have parted
on service of its twin — we succeed in pointing her
outboard, and await a further deepening of the bows
ere launching her. Of the military, the officer com*
manding, some few of his juniors, a group of othei

58 David W . Bone

ranks, stand by. The senior officers of the ship, a
muster of seamen, a few stewards, are banded with
us at the last. We expect no further service of the
destroyers. The position of the ship is over-menac-
ing to any approach. They have all they can carry.
Steaming at a short distance they have the appear-
ance of being heavily overloaded; each has a stagger-
ing list and Hes low in the water under their deck
encumbrance. We have only the hazard of a quick
out-throw of the remaining boat and the chances of a
grip on floating wreckage to count upon.

On a sudden swift sheer, Rifleman takes the risk.
Unheeding our warning hail, she steams across the
bows and backs at a high speed: her rounded stern
jars on our hull plates, a whaler and the davits catch
on a projection and give with the ring of buckling
steel — she turns on the throw of the propellers and
closes aboard with a resounding impact that sets her
living deck-load to stagger.

We lose no time. Scrambling down the life-ropes,
our small company endeavors to get foothold on her
decks. The destroyer widens off at the rebound, but
by clutch of friendly hands the men are dragged
aboard. One fails to reach safety. A soldier loses
grip and goes to the water. The chief officer follows
him. Tired and unstrung as he must be by the de-
voted labors of the last half-hour, he is in no con-

''The Man-o'-War's 'Er 'Usband'' 59

dition to effect a rescue. A sudden deep rumble from
within the sinking ship warns the destroyer captain
to go ahead. We are given no chance to aid our ship-
mates : the propellers tear the water in a furious race
that sweeps them away, and we draw off swiftly from
the side of the ship.

We are little more than clear of the settling fore-
end when the last buoyant breath of Cameronia is
overcome. Nobly she has held afloat to the debarking
of the last man. There is no further life in her.
Evenly, steadily, as we had seen her leave the launch-
ing ways at Meadowside, she goes down.

THE MARKET
By William McFee

William McFee's name is associated with the sea, but in his
writing he treats the life of ships and sailors more as a back-
ground than as the essential substance of his tale. I have chosen
this brief and colorful little sketch to represent his talent be-
cause it is diflferent from the work with which most of his readers
are familiar, and because it represents a mood very characteristic
of him — an imaginative and observant treatment of the workings
of commerce. His interest in fruit is intimate, as he has been
for some years an engineer in the sea service of the United
Fruit Company, with a Mediterranean interim — reflected in much
of his recent writing — during the War.

The publication of McFee's Casuals of the Sea in 1916 was
something of an event in the world of books, and introduced to
the reading world a new writer of unquestionable strength and
subtlety. His earlier books. An Ocean Tramp and Aliens (both
republished since), had gone almost unnoticed — which, it is safe
to say, will not happen again to anything he cares to publish.
His later books are Captain Macedoine's Daughter. Harbours of
Memory, and An Engineer's Notebook. He was born at sea in
]88i, the son of a sea-captain; grew up in a northern suburb
of London, served his apprenticeship in a big engineering shop,
and has been in ships most of the time since 1905.

There is a sharp, imperative rap on my outer door;
a rap having within its insistent urgency a shadow of
delicate diffidence, as though the person responsible
were a trifle scared of the performance and on tiptoe
to run away. I roll over and regard the clock. Four-
forty. One of the dubious by-products of continuous
service as a senior assistant at sea is the habit of
waking automatically about 4 a. m. This gives one sev-
eral hours, when ashore, to meditate upon one*s sins,

60

The Market 6l

frailties, and (more rarely) triumphs and virtues.
For a man who gets up at say four-thirty is regarded
with aversion ashore. His family express themselves
with superfluous vigor. He must lie still and med-
itate, or suffer the ignominy of being asked when he
is going away again.

Bat this morning, in these old Chambers in an
ancient Inn buried in the heart of London City, I
have agreed to get up and go out. The reason for
this momentous departure from a life of temporary
but deliberate indolence is a lady. ''Cherchez la
femme," as the French say with the dry animosity of
a logical race. Well, she is not far to seek, being
on the outside of my heavy oak door, tapping, as al-
ready hinted, with a sharp insistent delicacy. To
this romantic summons I reply with an articulate growl
of acquiescence, and proceed to get ready. To relieve
the anxiety of any reader who imagines an impend-
ing elopement it may be stated in succinct truthfulness
that we are bound on no such desperate venture. Wq
are going round the corner a few blocks up the Strand,
to Covent Garden Market, to see the arrival of the
metropolitan supply of produce.

Having accomplished a hasty toilet, almost as prim-
itive as that favored by gentlemen aroused to go on
watch, and placating an occasional repetition of the
tapping by brief protests and reports of progress, I

62 William McFee

take hat and cane, and drawing the huge antique bolts
of my door, discover a young woman standing by the
window looking out upon the quadrangle of the old
Inn. She is a very decided young woman, who is
continually thinking out what she calls "stunts" for
articles in the press. That is her profession, or one
of her professions — writing articles for the press.
The other profession is selling manuscripts, which con-
stitutes the tender bond between us. For the usual
agent's commission she is selling one of my manu-
scripts. Being an unattached and, as it were, unpro-
tected male, she plans little excursions about London
to keep me instructed and entertained. Here she is
attired in the flamboyant finery of a London flower-
girl. She is about to get the necessary copy for a
special artkle in a morning paper. With the excep-
tion of a certain expectant flash of her bright black
Irish eyes, she is entirely businesslike. Commenting
on the beauty of an early summer morning in town,
we descend, and passing out under the ponderous an-
cient archway, we make our leisurely progress west-
ward down the Strand.

London is always beautiful to those who love and
understand that extraordinary microcosm; but at five
of a summer morning there is about her an exquisite
quality of youthful fragrance and debonair freshness
which goes to the heart. The newly-hosed streets are

The Market 63

shining in the sunlight as though paved with "patines
of bright gold." Early 'buses rumble by from neigh-
boring barns where they have spent the night. And,
as we near the new Gaiety Theatre, thrusting forward
into the great rivers of traffic soon to pour round its
base like some bold Byzantine promontory, we see
Waterloo Bridge thronged with wagons, piled high.
From all quarters they are coming, past Charing Cross
the great wains are arriving from Paddington Ter-
minal, from the market-garden section of Middlesex
and Surrey. Down Wellington Street come carts
laden with vegetables from Brentwood and Cogge-
shall, and neat vans packed with crates of watercress
which grows in the lush lowlands of Suffolk and Cam-
bridgeshire, and behind us are thundering huge four-
horse vehicles from the docks, vehicles with peaches
from South Africa, potatoes from the Canary Islands,
onions from France, apples from California, oranges
from the West Indies, pineapples from Central
America, grapes from Spain and bananas from
Colombia.

We turn in under an archway behind a theatre
and adjacent to the stage-door of the Opera House.
The booths are rapidly filling with produce. Gentle-
men in long alpaca coats and carrying formidable
marbled note-books walk about with an important
air. A mountain range of pumpkins rises behind a

64 William McFee

hill of cabbages. Festoons of onions are being sus-
pended from rails. The heads of barrels are being
knocked in, disclosing purple grapes buried in cork-
dust. Pears and figs, grown under glass for wealthy
patrons, repose in soft tissue-lined boxes. A broken
crate of tangerine oranges has spilled its contents in
a splash of ruddy gold on the plank runway. A
wagon is driven in, a heavy load of beets, and the
broad wheels crush through the soft fruit so that the
air is heavy with the acrid sweetness.

We pick our way among the booths and stalls until
we find the flowers. Here is a crowd of ladies, young,
so-so and some quite matronly^ and all dressed in
this same flamboyant finery of which I have spoken.
They are grouped about an almost overpowering mass
of blooms. Roses just now predominate. There is
a satisfying solidity about the bunches, a glorious
abundance which, in a commodity so easily enjoyed
without ownership, is scarcely credible. I feel no
desire to own these huge aggregations of odorous
beauty. It would be like owning a harem, one imag-
ines. Violets, solid patches of vivid blue in round
baskets, eglantine in dainty boxes, provide a foil to
the majestic blazonry of the roses and the dew-
spangled forest of maiden-hair fern near by.

"And what are those things at all?" demands my
companion, diverted for a moment from the flowers.

The Market 65

She nods towards a mass of dull-green affairs piled
on mats or being lifted from big vans. She is a
Cockney and displays surprise when she is told those
things are bananas. She shrugs and turns again to
the musk-roses, and forgets. But to me, as the harsh,
penetrating odor of the green fruit cuts across the
heavy perfume of the flowers, comes a picture of the
farms in distant Colombia or perhaps Costa Rica.
There is nothing like an odor to stir memories. I see
the timber pier and the long line of rackety open-
slatted cars jangling into the dark shed, pushed by a
noisy, squealing locomotive. I see the boys lying
asleep between shifts, their enormous straw hats cov-
ering their faces as they sprawl. In the distance rise
the blue mountains ; behind is the motionless blue sea.
I hear the whine of the elevators, the monotonous
click of the counters, the harsh cries of irresponsible
and argumentative natives. I feel the heat of the
tropic day, and see the gleam of the white waves
breaking on yellow sands below tall palms. I recall
the mysterious impenetrable solitude of the jungle, a
solitude alive, if one is equipped with knowledge,
with a ceaseless warfare of winged and crawling hosts.
And while my companion is busily engaged in getting
copy for a special article about the Market, I step
nimbly out of the way of a swarthy gentleman from
Calabria, who with his two-wheeled barrow is the last

66 William McFee

link in the immense chain of transportation connecting
the farmer in the distant tropics and the cockney pedes-
trian who halts on the sidewalk and purchases a ban-
ana for a couple of pennies.

HOLY IRELAND
By Joyce Kilmer

This echo of the A.E.F. is probably the best thing Joyce Kil-
mer ever wrote, and shows the vein of real tenderness and
insight that lay beneath his lively and versatile career on Grub
Street. In him, as in many idealists, the Irish theme had become
legendary, it was part of his religion and his dream-life, and he
treated it with real affection and humor. You will find it crop-
ping out niany times in his verses. The Irish problem as it is
reflected in this country is not always clearly understood.
Ireland. ^ in the minds of our poets, is a mystical land of green
hills, saints and leprechauns, and its political problems are easy.

Joyce Kilmer was born in New Brunswick in 1886; studied at
Rutgers College and Columbia University; taught school; worked
on the staff of the Standard Dictionary ; passed through phases
of socialism and Anglicanism into the Catholic communion, and
joined the Sunday staff of the New York Times in 1913. He was
killed fighting in France in 1918. This sketch is taken from
the second of the three volumes in which Robert Cortes Holliday,
his friend and executor, has collected Joyce Kilmer's work.

We had hiked seventeen miles that stormy December
day — the third of a four days' journey. The snow
was piled high on our packs, our rifles were crusted
with ice, the leather of our hob-nailed boots was
frozen stiff over our lamed feet. The weary lieutenant
led us to the door of a little house in a side street.

"Next twelve men," he said. A dozen of us dropped
out of the ranks and dragged ourselves over the
threshold. We tracked snow and mud over a spot-
less stone floor. Before an open fire stood Madame
and the three children — a girl of eight years, a boy of

67

68 Joyce Kilmer

five, a boy of three. They stared with round fright-
ened eyes at les soldats Americans, the first they had
ever seen. We were too tired to stare back. We ai
once cHmbed to the chill attic, our billet, our lodging
for the night. First we lifted the packs from one an-
other's aching shoulders : then, without spreading our
blankets, we lay down on the bare boards.

For ten minutes there was silence, broken by an
occasional groan, an oath, the striking of a match.
Cigarettes glowed like firefiies in a forest. Then a
voice came from the corner :

*'Where is Sergeant Reilly?" it said. We lazily
searched. There was no Sergeant Reilly to be
found.

"I'll bet the old bum has gone out after a pint,"
said the voice. And with the curiosity of the Amer-
ican and the enthusiasm of the Irish we lumbered
downstairs in quest of Sergeant Reilly.

He was sitting on a low bench by the fire. His
shoes were ofiF and his bruised feet were in a pail of
cold water. He was too good a soldier to expose them
to the heat at once. The little girl was on his lap
and the little boys stood by and envied him. And in
a voice that twenty years of soldierino^ and oceans of
whisky had failed to rob of its Celtic sweetness, he
was softly singing: "Ireland Isn't Ireland Any More."
We listened respectfully.

Holy Ireland 69

"They cheer the King and then salute him," said
Sergeant Reilly.

''A regular Irishman would shoot him," and we
all joined in the chorus, "Ireland Isn't Ireland Any
More."

"Ooh, la, la!" exclaimed Madame, and she and all
the children began to talk at the top of their voices.
What they said Heaven knows, but the tones were
friendly, even admiring.

"Gentlemen," said Sergeant Reilly from his post of
honor, "the lady who runs this billet is a very nice
lady indeed. She says yez can all take off your shoes
and dry your socks by the fire. But take turns and
don't crowd or I'll turn yez all upstairs."

Now Madame, a woman of some forty years, was
a true bourgeoise, with all the thrift of her class. And
by the terms of her agreement with the authorities she
was required to let the soldiers have for one night the
attic of her house to sleep in — nothing more ; no light,
no heat. Also, wood is very expensive in France —
for reasons that are engraven in letters of blood on
the pages of history. Nevertheless —

"Asseyez-vous, s'il vous plait," said Madame. And
she brought nearer to the fire all the chairs the estab-
lishment possessed and some chests and boxes to be
used as seats. And she and the little girl, whose name
was Solange, went out into the snow and came back

70 Joyce Kilmer

with heaping armfuls of small logs. The fire blazed
merrily — more merrily than it had blazed since Aug-
ust, 1914, perhaps. We surrounded it, and soon the
air was thick with steam from our drying socks.

Meanwhile Madame and the Sergeant had gener-
ously admitted all eleven of us into their conversation.
A spirited conversation it was, too, in spite of the
fact that she knew no English and the extent of his
French was *'du pain," "du vin," "cognac" and "bon
jour." Those of us who knew a little more of the
language of the country acted as interpreters for the
others. We learned the names of the children and
their ages. We learned that our hostess was a widow.
Her husband had fallen in battle just one month be-
fore our arrival in her home. She showed us with
simple pride and affection and restrained grief his
picture. Then she showed us those of her two brothers
— one now fighting at Salonica, the other a prisoner
of war — of her mother and father, of herself dressed
for First Communion.

This last picture she showed somewhat shyly, as if
doubting that we would understand it. But when one
of us asked in halting French if Solange, her little
daughter, had yet made her First Conimunion, then
Madame's face cleared.

"Mais oui!" she exclaimed, "Et vous, ma foi, vous
etes Catholiques, n'est-ce pas?"

Holy Ireland 71

At once rosary beads were flourished to prove our
right to answer this question affirmatively. Tattered
prayer-books and somewhat dingy scapulars were
brought to light. Madame and the children chattered
their surprise and dehght to each other, and every ex-
hibit called for a new outburst.

"Ah, le bon S. Benoit! Ah, voila, le Conception
Immacule! Ooh la la, le Sacre Coeurl" (which last
exclamation sounded in no wise as irreverent as it
looks in print).

Now other treasures, too, were shown — treasures
chiefly photographic. There were family groups, there
were Coney Island snapshots. And Madame and the
children were a gratifyingly appreciative audience.
They admired and sympathized; they exclaimed ap-
propriately at the beauty of every girl's face, the tender-
ness of every pictured mother. We had become the
intimates of Madame. She had admitted us into her
family and we her into ours.

Soldiers — American soldiers of Irish descent — ^have
souls and hearts. These organs (if the soul may be
so termed) had been satisfied. But our stomachs re-
mained— and that they yearned was evident to us.
We had made our hike on a meal of hardtack and
"corned willy." Mess call would sound soon. Should
we force our wet shoes on again and plod through
the snowy streets to the temporary mess-shack? We

72 Joyce Kilmer

knew our supply wagons had not succeeded in climb-
ing the last hill into town, and that therefore bread
and unsweetened coffee would be our portion. A
great depression settled upon us.

But Sergeant Reilly rose to the occasion.

"Boys/' he said, "this here lady has got a good fire
going, and I'll bet she can cook. What do you say
we get her to fix us up a meal?"

The proposal was received joyously at first. Then
some one said :

"But I haven't got any money." "Neither have I
— not a damn sou!" said another. And again the
spiritual temperature of the room fell.

Again Sergeant Reilly spoke :

"I haven't got any money to speak of, meself," he
said. "But let's have a show-down. I guess we've
got enough to buy somethin' to eat."

It was long after pay-day, and we were not hopeful
of the results of the search. But the wealthy (that is,
those who had two francs) made up for the poor
(that is, those who had two sous). And among the
coins on the table I noticed an American dime, an
English half-crown and a Chinese piece with a square
hole in the center. In negotiable tender the money
came in all to eight francs.

It takes more money than that to feed twelve hungry
soldiers these days in France. But there was no harm

Holy Ireland 73

in trying. So an ex-seminarian, an ex-bookkeeper
and an ex-street-car conductor aided Sergeant Reilly
in explaining in French that had both a brogue and a
Yankee twang that we were hungry, that this was all
the money we had in the world, and that we wanted
her to cook us something to eat.

Now Madame was what they call in New England
a "capable" woman. In a jiffy she had the money in
Solange's hand and had that admirable child cloaked
and wooden-shod for the street, and fully informed
as to what she was to buy. What Madame and the
children had intended to have for supper I do not
know, for there was nothing in the kitchen but the
fire, the stove, the table, some shelves of dishes and
an enormous bed. Nothing in the way of a food cup-
board could be seen. And the only other room of the
house was the bare attic.

When Solange came back she carried in a basket
bigger than herself these articles: (i) two loaves of
war-bread; (2) five bottles of red wine; (3) three
cheeses; (4) numerous potatoes; (5) a lump of fat;
(6) a bag of coffee. The whole represented, as was
afterward demonstrated, exactly the sum of ten francs,
fifty centimes.

Well, we all set to work peeling potatoes. Then
with a veritable French trench-knife Madame cut the
potatoes into long strips. Meanwhile Solange had put

74 Joyce Kilmer

the lump of fat into the big black pot that hung by a
chain over the fire. In the boiling grease the potatoes
were placed, Madame standing by with a big ladle
punched full of holes (I regret that I do not know the
technical name for this instrument) and keeping the
potato-strips swimming, zealously frustrating any at-
tempt on their part to lie lazily at the bottom of the
pot.

We forgot all about the hike as we sat at supper
that evening. The only absentees were the two little
boys, Michael and Paul. And they were really absent
only from our board — they were in the room, in the
great built-in bed that was later to hold also Madame
and Solange. Their little bodies were covered by
the three- foot thick mattress-like red silk quilt, but
their tousled heads protruded and they watched us
unblinkingly all the evening.

But just as we sat down, before Sergeant Reilly
began his task of dishing out the potatoes and starting
the bottles on their way, Madame stopped her chat-
tering and looked at Solange. And Solange stopped
her chattering and looked at Madame. And they both
looked rather searchingly at us. We didn't know
what was the matter, but we felt rather embarrassed.

Then Madame began to talk, slowly and loudly, as
one talks to make foreigners understand. And the
gist of her remarks was that she was surprised to see

Holy Ireland 75

that American Catholics did not say grace before
eating like French Catholics.

We sprang to our feet at once. But it was not
Sergeant Reilly who saved the situation. Instead, the
ex-seminarian (he is only temporarily an ex-semin-
arian; he'll be preaching missions and giving retreats
yet if a bit of shrapnel doesn't hasten his journey to
Heaven) said, after we had blessed ourselves: "Bene-
dicite; nos et quae sumus sumpturi benedicat Deus,
Pater et Filius et Spiritus Sanctus. Amen."

Madame and Solange, obviously relieved, joined
us in the Amen, and we sat down again to eat.

It was a memorable feast. There was not much
conversation — except on the part of Madame and
Solange — but there was plenty of good cheer. Also
there was enough cheese and bread and wine and
potatoes for all of us — half starved as we were when
we sat down. Even big Considine, who drains a can
of condensed milk at a gulp and has been known to
eat an apple pie without stopping to take breath, was
satisfied. There were toasts, also, all proposed by
Sergeant Reilly — toasts to Madame, and to the chil-
dren, and to France, and to the United States, and to
the Old Gray Mare (this last toast having an esoteric
significance apparent only to illuminati of Sergeant
Reilly's circle).

The table cleared and the "agimus tibi gratias" duly

76 Joyce Kilmer

said, we sat before the fire, most of us on the floor.
We were warm and happy and full of good food and
good wine. I spied a slip of paper on the floor by
Solange's foot and unashamedly read it. It was an
accounting for the evening's expenditures — ^totaling
exactly ten francs and fifty centimes.

Now when soldiers are unhappy — during a long,
hard hike, for instance — they sing to keep up their
spirits. And when they are happy, as on the even-
ing now under consideration, they sing to express
their satisfaction with life. We sang "Sweet Rosie
O'Grady." We shook the kitchen-bedroom with the
echoes of "Take Me Back to New York Town." We
informed Madame, Solange, Paul, Michael, in fact,
the whole village, that we had never been a wanderer
and that we longed for our Indiana home. We grew
sentimental over "Mother Machree." And Sergeant
Reilly obliged with a reel — in his socks — to an accom-
plishment of whistling and handclapping.

Now, it was our hostess's turn to entertain. We
intimated as much. She responded, first by much talk,
much consultation with Solange, and finally by going
to one of the shelves that held the pans and taking
down some paper-covered books.

There was more consultation, whispered this time,
and much turning of pages. Then, after some pre-
liminary coughing and humming, the music began

Holy Ireland 77

' — the woman's rich alto blending with the child's
shrill but sweet notes. And what they sang was
"Tantum ergo Sacramentum."

Why she should have thought that an appropriate
song to offer this company of rough soldiers from a
distant land I do not know. And why we found it
appropriate it is harder still to say. But it did seem
appropriate to all of us — to Sergeant Reilly, to Jim
(who used to drive a truck), to Larry (who sold
cigars), to Frank (who tended a bar on Fourteenth
Street). It seemed, for some reason, eminently fit-
ting. Not one of us then or later expressed any sur-
prise that this hymn, familiar to most of us since
our mothers first led us to the Parish Church down
the pavements of New York or across the Irish hills,
should be sung to us in this strange land and in these
strange circumstances.

Since the gracious Latin of the Church was in
order and since the season was appropriate, one of
us suggested "Adeste Fideles" for the next item on
the evening's program. Madame and Solange and our
ex-seminarian knew all the words and the rest of us
came in strong with "Venite, adoremus Dominum."

Then, as if to show that piety and mirth may live
together, the ladies obliged with "Au Clair de la Lune"
and other simple ballads of old France. And after
taps had sounded in the street outside our door, and

yS Joyce Kilmer

there was yawning*, and wrist-watches were being
scanned, the evening's entertainment ended, by general
consent, with patriotic selections. We sang — as best
we could — the "Star-Spangled Banner," Solange and
her mother humming the air and applauding at the
conclusion. Then we attempted "ha, Marseillaise.'*
Of course, we did not know the words. Solange came
to our rescue with two little pamphlets containing the
song, so we looked over each other's shoulders and got
to work in earnest. Madame sang with us, and So-
lange. But during the final stanza Madame did not
sing. She leaned against the great family bedstead
and looked at us. She had taken one of the babies
from under the red comforter and held him to her
breast. One of her red and toil-scarred hands half
covered his fat little back. There was a gentle dignity
about that plain, hard-working woman, that soldier's
widow — we all felt it. And some of us saw the tears
in her eyes.

There are mists, faint and beautiful and unchang-
ing, that hang over the green slopes of some moun-
tains I know. I have seen them on the Irish hills and
I have seen them on the hills of France. I think that
they are made of the tears of good brave women.

Before I went to sleep that night I exchanged a few
words with Sergeant Reilly. We lay side by side
on the floor, now piled with straw. Blankets, shelter-

Holy Ireland 79

halves, slickers and overcoats insured warm sleep.
Sergeant Reilly's hard old face was wrapped round
with his muffler. The final cigarette of the day burned
lazily in a comer of his mouth.

"That was a pretty good evening, Sarge," I said.
"We sure were in luck when we struck this billet."

He grunted affirmatively, then puffed in silence for
a few minutes. Then he deftly spat the cigarette into
a strawless portion of the floor, where it glowed for a
few seconds before it went out.

"You said it," he remarked. "We were in luck is
right. What do you know about that lady, anyway ?"

"Why," I answered, "I thought she treated us pretty
white."

"Joe," said Sergeant Reilly, "do you realize how
much trouble that woman took to make this bunch
of roughnecks comfortable? She didn't make a damn
cent on that feed, you know. The kid spent all the
money we give her. And she's out about six francs
for firewood, too — I wish to God I had the money
to pay her. I bet she'll go cold for a week now, and
hungry, too.

"And that ain't all," he continued, after a pause
broken only by an occasional snore from our blissful
neighbors. "Look at the way she cooked them pomme
de terres and fixed things up for us and let us sit
down there with her like we was her family. And

8o Joyce Kilmer

look at the way she and the Httle Sallie there sung
for us.

"I tell you, Joe, it makes me think of old times to
hear a woman sing them church hymns to me that
way. It's forty years since I heard a hymn sung in
a kitchen, and it was my mother, God rest her, that
sang them. I sort of realize what weVe fighting for
now, and I never did before. It's for women like
that and their kids.

"It gave me a turn to see her a-sitting there singing
them hymns. I remembered when I was a boy in
Shangolden. I wonder if there's many women like
that in France now — telling their beads and singing
the old hymns and treating poor traveling men the
way she's just after treating us. There used to be
lots of women like that in the Old Country. And I
think that's why it was called 'Holy Ireland.' '*

A FAMILIAR PREFACE
By Joseph Conrad

This glorious expression of the credo of all artists, in what-
ever form of creation, lastingly enriches the English tongue. It
is from the preface to A Personal Record, that fascinating auto-
biographical volume in which Conrad tells the curious story of
a Polish boy who ran away to sea and began to write in Eng-
lish. As a companion piece, those who have the honor of the
writer's craft at heart should read Conrad's preface to The
Nigger of the Narcissus.

"All arnbitions are lawful except those which climb upward
on the miseries or credulities of mankind." Is it permissible to
wonder what some newspaper owners — say Mr. Hearst — would
reply to that?

Mr. Conrad's career is too well known to be annotated here.
If by any chance the reader is not acquainted with it, it will be
to his soul's advantage to go to a public library and look it up.

As a general rule we do not want much encourage-
ment to talk about ourselves ; yet this little book * is the
result of a friendly suggestion, and even of a little
friendly pressure. I defended myself with some spirit;
but, with characteristic tenacity, the friendly voice
insisted, "You know, you really must."

It was not an argument, but I submitted at once.
If one must! . . .

You perceive the force of a word. He who wants
to persuade should put his trust not in the right argu-
ment, but in the right word. The power of sound

* A Personal Record.

6i

82 Joseph Conrad

has always been greater than the power of sense. I
don't say this by way of disparagement. It is better
for mankind to be impressionable than reflective.
Nothing humanely great — great, I mean, as affecting
a whole mass of lives — has come from reflection. On
the other hand, you cannot fail to see the power of
mere words; such words as Glory, for instance, or
Pity. I won't mention any more. They are not far
to seek. Shouted with perseverance, with ardor,
with conviction, these two by their sound alone hav^
set whole nations in motion and upheaved the dry,
hard ground on which rests our whole social fabric;
There's "virtue" for you if you like! ... Of course,
the accent must be attended to. The right accent*
That's very important. The capacious lung, the thun-
dering or the tender vocal chords. Don't talk to me
of your Archimedes' lever. He was an absent-minded
person with a mathematical imagination. Mathemat-
ics commands all my respect, but I have no use for
engines. Give me the right word and the right ac-
cent and I will move the world.

What a dream for a writer ! Because written words
have their accent, too. Yes! Let me only find the
right word ! Surely it must be lying somewhere among
the wreckage of all the plaints and all the exultations
poured out aloud since the first day when hope, the
undying, came down on earth. It may be there, close

A Familiar Preface 83

by, disregarded, invisible, quite at hand. But it's no
good. I believe there are men who can lay hold of
a needle in a pottle of hay at the first try. For my-
self, I have never had such luck.

And then there is that accent. Another difficulty.
For who is going to tell whether the accent is right
or wrong till the word is shouted, and fails to be
heard, perhaps, and goes down-wind, leaving the world
unmoved ? Once upon a time there lived an emperor
who was a sage and something of a literary man. He
jotted down on ivory tablets thoughts, maxims, reflec-
. tions which chance has preserved for the edification of
posterity. Among other sayings — I am quoting from
memory — I remember this solemn admonition: "Let
all thy words have the accent of heroic truth." The
accent of heroic truth! This is very fine, but I am
thinking that it is an easy matter for an austere em-
peror to jot down grandiose advice. Most of the
working truths on this earth are humble, not heroic;
and there have been times in the history of mankind
when the accents of heroic truth have moved it to
nothing but derision.

Nobody will expect to find between the covers of
this little book words of extraordinary potency or
accents of irresistible heroism. However humiliating
for my self-esteem, I must confess that the counsels
of Marcus Aurelius are not for me. They are more

84 Joseph Conrad

fit for a moralist than for an artist. Truth of a
modest sort I can promise you, and also sincerity.
That complete, praiseworthy sincerity which, while
it delivers one into the hands of one's enemies, is as
likely as not to embroil one with one's friends.

"Embroil" is perhaps too strong an expression. I
can't imagine among either my enemies or my friends
a being so hard up for something to do as to quarrel
with me. "To disappoint one's friends" would be
nearer the mark. Most, almost all, friendships of the
writing period of my life have come to me through
my books; and I know that a novelist lives in his
work. He stands there, the only reality in an in-
vented world, among imaginary things, happenings,
and people. Writing about them, he is only writing
about himself. But the disclosure is not complete.
He remains, to a certain extent, a figure behind the
veil ; a suspected rather than a seen presence — a move-
ment and a voice behind the draperies of fiction. In
these personal notes there is no such veil. And I
cannot help thinking of a passage in the "Imitation of
Christ" where the ascetic author, who knew life so
profoundly, says that "there are persons esteemed on
their reputation who by showing themselves destroy
the opinion one had of them." This is the danger
incurred by an author of fiction who sets out to talk
about himself without disguise.

A Familiar Preface 85

While these reminiscent pages were appearing seri-
ally I was remonstrated with for bad economy; as if
such writing were a form of self-indulgence wasting
the substance of future volumes. It seems that I am
not sufficiently literary. Indeed, a man who never
wrote a line for print till he was thirty-six cannot
bring himself to look upon his existence and his ex-
perience, upon the sum of his thoughts, sensations, and
emotions, upon his memories and his regrets, and the
whole possession of his past, as only so much material
for his hands. Once before, some three years ago,
when I published 'The Mirror of the Sea," a volume
of impressions and memories, the same remarks were
made to me. Practical remarks. But, truth to say, I
have never understood the kind of thrift they recom-
mend. I wanted to pay my tribute to the sea, its
ships and its men, to whom I remain indebted for so
much which has gone to make me what I am. That
seemed to me the only shape in which I could offer
it to their shades. There could not be a question in
my mind of anything else. It is quite possible that I
am a bad economist; but it is certain that I am in-
corrigible.

Having matured in the surroundings and under the
special conditions of sea life, I have a special piety
toward that form of my past ; for its impressions were
vivid, its appeal direct, its demands such as could be

86 Joseph Conrad

responded to with the natural elation of youth and
strength equal to the call. There was nothing in them
to perplex a young conscience. Having broken away
from my origins under a storm of blame from every
quarter which had the merest shadow of right to
voice an opinion, removed by great distances from
such natural affections as were still left to me, and
even estranged, in a measure, from them by the totally
unintelligible character of the life which had seduced
me so mysteriously from my allegiance, I may safely
say that through the blind force of circumstances the
sea was to be all my world and the merchant service
my only home for a long succession of years. No
wonder, then, that in my two exclusively sea books
— "The Nigger of the Narcissus," and 'The Mirror
of the Sea" (and in the few short sea stories like
"Youth" and "Typhoon") — I have tried with an
almost filial regard to render the vibration of life in the
great world of waters, in the hearts of the simple men
who have for ages traversed its solitudes, and also
that something sentient which seems to dwell in ships
— the creatures of their hands and the objects of their
care.

One's literary life must turn frequently for sus-
tenance to memories and seek discourse with the
shades, unless one has made up one's mind to write
only in order to reprove mankind for what it is, or

A Familiar Preface 87

praise it for what it is not, or— generally— to teach it
how to behave. Being neither quarrelsome, nor a
flatterer, nor a sage, I have done none of these things,
and I am prepared to put up serenely with the in-
significance which attaches to persons who are not
meddlesome in some way or other. But resignation is
not indifference. I would not like to be left stand-
ing as a mere spectator on the bank of the great stream
carrying onward so many lives. I would fain claim
for myself the faculty of so much insight as can be
expressed in a voice of sympathy and compassion.

It seems to me that in one, at least, authoritative
quarter of criticism I am suspected of a certain unemo-
tional, grim acceptance of facts— of what the French
would call secheresse du coeur. Fifteen years of un-
broken silence before praise or blame testify suffi-
ciently to my respect for criticism, that fine flower
of personal expression in the garden of letters. But
this is more of a personal matter, reaching the man
behind the work, and therefore it may be alluded to
in a volume which is a personal note in the margin
of the public page. Not that I feel hurt in the least.
The charge— if it amounted to a charge at all— was
made in the most considerate terms; in a tone of re-
gret.

My answer is that if it be true that every novel con-
tains an element of autobiography — and this can hardly

88 Joseph Conrad

be denied, since the creator can only express himself
in his creation — then there are some of us to whom
an open display of sentiment is repugnant. I would
not unduly praise the virtue of restraint. It is often
merely temperamental. But it is not always a sign of
coldness. It may be pride. There can be nothing
more humiliating than to see the shaft of one's emo-
tion miss the mark of either laughter or tears. Noth-
ing more humiliating! And this for the reason that
should the mark be missed, should the open display
of emotion fail to move, then it must perish unavoid-
ably in disgust or contempt. No artist can be re-
proached for shrinking from a risk which only fools
run to meet and only genius dare confront with im-
punity. In a task which mainly consists in laying one's
soul more or less bare to the world, a regard for
decency, even at the cost of success, is but the regard
for one's own dignity which is inseparably united
with the dignity of one's work.

And then — it is very difficult to be wholly joyous or
wholly sad on this earth. The comic, when it is human,
soon takes upon itself a face of pain; and some of our
griefs (some only, not all, for it is the capacity for
suffering which makes man august in the eyes of men)
have their source in weaknesses which must be recog-
nized with smiling compassion as the common in-
heritance of us all. Joy and sorrow in this world

A Familiar Preface 89

pass into each other, mingHng their forms and their
murmurs in the twiHght of Hfe as mysterious as an
overshadowed ocean, while the dazzhng brightness of
supreme hopes lies far off, fascinating and still, on
the distant edge of the horizon.

Yes! I, too, would like to hold the magic wand
giving that command over laughter and tears which
is declared to be the highest achievement of imagina-
tive literature. Only, to be a great magician one must
surrender oneself to occult and irresponsible powers,
either outside or within one's breast. We have all
heard of simple men selling their souls for love or
power to some grotesque devil. The most ordinary
intelligence can perceive without much reflection that
anything of the sort is bound to be a fool's bargain.
I don't lay claim to particular wisdom because of my
dislike and distrust of such transactions. It may be
my sea training acting upon a natural disposition to
keep good hold on the one thing really mine, but the
fact is that I have a positive horror of losing even
for one moving moment that full possession of myself
which is the first condition of good service. And I
have carried my notion of good service from my ear-
lier into my later existence. I, who have never sought
in the written word anything else but a form of the
Beautiful — I have carried over that article of creed
from the decks of ships to the more circumscribed

90 Joseph Conrad

space of my desk, and by that act, I suppose, I have
become permanently imperfect in the eyes of the in-
effable company of pure esthetes.

As in political so in literary action a man wins
friends for himself mostly by the passion of his
prejudices and by the consistent narrowness of his
outlook. But I have never been able to love what was
not lovable or hate what was not hateful out of defer-
ence for some general principle. Whether there be
any courage in making this admission I know not.
After the middle turn of life's way we consider dan-
gers and joys with a tranquil mind. So I proceed
in peace to declare that I have always suspected in
the effort to bring into play the extremities of emotions
the debasing touch of insincerity. In order to move
others deeply we must deliberately allow ourselves to
be carried away beyond the bounds of our normal sen-
sibility— innocently enough, perhaps, and of necessity,
like an actor who raises his voice on the stage above
the pitch of natural conversation — but still we have
to do that. And surely this is no great sin. But the
danger lies in the writer becoming the victim of his
own exaggeration, losing the exact notion of sin-
cerity, and in the end coming to despise truth itself
as something too cold, too blunt for his purpose — as,
in fact, not good enough for his insistent emotion.

A Familiar Preface 91

From laughter and tears the descent is easy to snivel-
ling and giggles.

These may seem selfish considerations; but you
can't, in sound morals, condemn a man for taking
care of his own integrity. It is his clear duty. And
least of all can you condemn an artist pursuing, how-
ever humbly and imperfectly, a creative aim. In that
interior world where his thought and his emotions go
seeking for the experience of imagined adventures,
there are no policemen, no law, no pressure of cir-
cumstance or dread of opinion to keep him within
bounds. Who then is going to say Nay to his tempta-
tions if not his conscience?

And besides — this, remember, is the place and the
moment of perfectly open talk — I think that all ambi-
tions are lawful except those which climb upward on
the miseries or credulities of mankind. All intellec-
tual and artistic ambitions are permissible, up to and
even beyond the limit of prudent sanity. They can
hurt no one. If they are mad, then so much the worse
for the artist. Indeed, as virtue is said to be, such
ambitions are their own reward. Is it such a very
mad presumption to believe in the sovereign power
of one's art, to try for other means, for other ways
of affirming this belief in the deeper appeal of one's
work? To try to go deeper is not to be insensible.

92 Joseph Conrad

A historian of hearts is not a historian of emotions,
yet he penetrates further, restrained as he may be,
since his aim is to reach the very fount of laughter
and tears. The sight of human affairs deserves ad-
miration and pity. They are worthy of respect, too.
And he is not insensible who pays them the undemon-
strative tribute of a sigh which is not a sob, and
of a smile which is not a grin. Resignation, not mys-
tic, not detached, but resignation open-eyed, conscious,
and informed by love, is the only one of our feel-
ings for which it is impossible to become a sham.

Not that I think resignation the last word of wis-
dom. I am too much the creature of my time for
that. But I think that the proper wisdom is to will
what the gods will without, perhaps, being certain
what their will is — or even if they have a will of their
own. And in this matter of life and art it is not the
Why that matters so much to our happiness as the
How. As the Frenchman said, '7/ y a toujours la
maniere/' Very true. Yes. There is the manner.
The manner in laughter, in tears, in irony, in indig-
nations and enthusiasms, in judgments — and even in
love. The manner in which, as in the features and
character of a human face, the inner truth is fore-
shadowed for those who know how to look at their
kind.

Those who read me know my conviction that the

A Familiar Preface 93

world, the temporal world, rests on a few very simple
ideas; so simple that they must be as old as the hills.
It rests notably, among others, on the idea of Fidelity.
At a time when nothing which is not revolutionary in
some way or other can expect to attract much atten-
tion I have not been revolutionary in my writings.
The revolutionary spirit is mighty convenient in this,
that it frees one from all scruples as regards ideas.
Its hard, absolute optimism is repulsive to my mind
by the menace of fanaticism and intolerance it con-
tains. No doubt one should smile at these things;
but, imperfect Esthete, I am no better Philosopher.
All claim to special righteousness awakens in me that
scorn and anger from which a philosophical mind
should be free.

ON DRAWING
By A. P. Herbert

A. P, Herbert is one of the most brilliant of the younger Eng-
lish writers, and has done remarkable work in fields appar-
ently incompatible: light verse, humorous drolleries, and a beau-
tifully written tragic novel, The Secret Battle. This last was
unquestionably one of the most powerful books born of the War,
but its sale was tragically small. The House by the River, a
later book, was also an amazingly competent and original tale,
apparently cast along the lines of the conventional "mystery
story," but really a study of selfishness and cowardice done
with startling irony and intensity.

Mr. Herbert went to Winchester School and New College,
Oxford, where he took his degree in IQ14. He saw military
service at the Dardanelles and in France, and is now on the
staff of Pimch. There is no young writer in England from
whom one may more confidently expect a continuance of fine
work. This airy and delicious little absurdity is a perfect ex-
ample of what a genuine humorist can do.

H there is still any one in doubt as to the value of the old-
fashioned classical training in forming a lusty prose style, let
him examine Mr. Herbert's The Secret Battle. This book often
sounds oddly like a translation from vigorous Greek — e.g.,
Herodotus. It is lucid, compact, logical, rich in telling epithet,
informal and swift. H these are not the cardinal prose virtues,
what are?

It is commonly said that everybody can sing in the
bathroom ; and this is true. Singing is very easy.
Drawing, though, is much more difficult. I have
devoted a good deal of time to Drawing, one way
and another; I have to attend a great many committees
and public meetings, and at such functions I find
that Drawing is almost the only Art one can safis-

94

On Drawing 95

factorily pursue during the speeches. One really can-
not sing during the speeches; so as a rule I draw.
I do not say that I am an expert yet, but after a few
more meetings I calculate that I shall know Drawing
as well as it can be known.

The first thing, of course, is to get on to a really
good committee; and by a good committee I mean
a committee that provides decent materials. An ordi-
nary departmental committee is no use : generally they
only give you a couple of pages of lined foolscap and
no white blotting-paper, and very often the pencils
are quite soft. White blotting-paper is essential. I
know of no material the spoiling of which gives so
much artistic pleasure — except perhaps snow. Indeed,
if I was asked to choose between making pencil-marks
on a sheet of white blotting-paper and making foot-
marks on a sheet of white snow I should be in a thing-
ummy.

Much the best committees from the point of view
of material are committees about business which meet
at business premises — shipping offices, for choice. One
of the Pacific Lines has the best white blotting-paper
I know; and the pencils there are a dream. I am sure
the directors of that fimi are Drawers; for they al-
ways give you two pencils, one hard for doing noses,
and one soft for doing hair.

When you have selected your committee and the

{

96 A, P. Herbert

speeches are well away, the Drawing be-
gins. Much the best thing to draw is a man.
Not the chairman, or Lord Pommery Quint,
or any member of the committee, but just A
Man. Many novices make the mistake of se- Fig. i
lecting a subject for their Art before they
begin; usually they select the chairman. And when
they find it is more like Mr. Gladstone they are dis-
couraged. If they had waited a little it could have been
Mr. Gladstone officially.

As a rule I begin with the forehead and
work down to the chin (Fig. i).

When I have done the outline I put in the
eye. This is one of the most difficult parts
of Drawing; one is never quite sure where

^^^- ^ the eye goes. If, however, it is not a good
eye, a useful tip is to give the man spectacles; this
generally makes him a clergyman, but it helps the
eye (Fig. 2).

Now you have to outline the rest of the head, and
this is rather a gamble. Personally, I go in
ior strong heads (Fig. 3).

I am afraid it is not a strong neck; I
expect he is an author, and is not well fed.
But that is the worst of strong heads ; they
make it so difficult to join up the chin and
the back of the neck. ^^^' ^

On Drawing 97

The next thing to do is to put in the ear; and once
you have done this the rest is easy. Ears are much
more difficult than eyes (Fig. 4),

I hope that is right. It seems to me to be a little
too far to the southward. But it is done now. And
once you have put in the ear you can't go back; not
unless you are on a very good committee which pro-
vides india-rubber as well as pencils.

Now I do the hair. Hair may either be very fuzzy
or black, or lightish and thin. It de-
pends chiefly on what sort of pencils are
provided. For myself I prefer black hair,
because then the parting shows up bet-
ter (Fig. 5).
^ ^ Until one draws hair one never real-

rlG. 4

izes what large heads people have. Doing
the hair takes the Whole of a speech, usually, even one
of the chairman's speeches.

This is not one of my best men; I am sure the ear
is in the wrong place. And I am inclined to think
he ought to have spectacles. Only then he would
be a clergyman, and I have decided that
he is Mr. Philip Gibbs at the age of
twenty. So he must carry on with his eye
as it is.

I find that all my best men face to the
west; it is a curious thing. Sometimes I ' * ^

98 A. P. Herbert

draw two men facing each other, but the one facing
east is always a dud.

There, you see (Fig. 6) ? The one on the right
is a Bolshevik; he has a low forehead and beetling
brows — a most unpleasant man. Yet he has a power-
ful face. The one on the left was meant to be an-
other Bolshevik, arguing with him. But he has turned

Fig. 6

out to be a lady, so I have had to give her a "bun."
She is a lady solicitor ; but I don't know how she came
to be talking to the Bolshevik.

When you have learned how to do men, the only
other things in Drawing are Perspective and Land*
scape.

PERSPECTIVE is great fun: the best thing to do
is a long French road with telegraph poles (Fig. 7).

I have put in a fence as well.

LANDSCAPE is chiefly composed of hills and trees.
Trees are the most amusing, especially fluffy trees.

Here is a Landscape (Fig. 8).

Somehow or other a man has got into this land-

On Drawing 99

scape; and, as luck would have it, it is Napoleon.
Apart from this it is not a bad landscape.

Fig. 7

But it takes a very long speech to get an ambitious
piece of work like this through.

Fig. 8

There is one other thing I ought to have said.
Never attempt to draw a man front-face. It can't
be done.

O. HENRY
By O. W. Firkins

Several years ago I turned to Who's Who in America in hope
ni finding some information about O. W. Firkins, whose brilhant
reviews — chiefly of poetry — were appearing in The Nation. I
found no entry, but every few months 1 would again rummage
that stout red volume with the same intention, forgetting that
I had done so before without success. It seemed hardly credible
that a critic so brilliant had been overlooked by the industrious
compilers of that work, which includes hundreds of hacks and
fourflushers. When gathering the contents of this book I tried
Who's Who again, still without result. I wrote to Mr, Firkins
pleading for biographical details; modestly, but fi/miy, he de-
nied me.

So all I can tell you is this, that Mr. Firkins is to my mind
one of the half-dozen most sparkling critics in this country.
One sometimes feels that he is carried a little past his destina-
tion by the sheer gusto and hilarity of his antitheses and para-
doxes. That is not so, however, in this essay about O. Henry,
an author who has often been grotesquely mispraised (I did not
say overpraised) by people incompetent to appreciate his true
greatness. Mr. Robert Cortes Holiiday, in an essay called "The
Amazing Failure of O. Henry," said that O. Henry created no
memorable characters. Mr. Firkins suggests the obvious but
satisfying answer — New York itself is his triumph. The New
York of O. Henry, already almost erased physically, remains a
personality and an identity.

Mr. Firkins is professor of English at the University of
Minnesota, and a contributing editor of The Weekly Retne".i.',
in which this essay first appeared in September, 1919. The
footnotes are, of course, his own.

There are two opinions concerning O. Henry. The
middle class views him as the impersonation of vigor
and brilliancy ; part of the higher criticism sees in him
little but sensation and persiflage. Between these views
there is a natural relation; the gods of the heathens

100

O. Henry loi

are ipso facto the demons of Christianity. Unmixed
assertions, however, are commonly mixtures of truth
and falsehood; there is room to-day for an estimate
which shall respect both opinions and adopt neither.
There is one literary trait in which I am unable
to name any wiiter of tales in any literature who
surpasses O. Henry.* It is not primary or even
secondary among literary merits; it is less a value
per se than the condition or foundation of values.
But its utility is manifest, and it is rare among men:
Chaucer and Shakespeare prove the possibility of its
absence in masters of that very branch of art in
which its presence would seem to be imperative. I
refer to the designing of stories — not to the primary
intuition or to skill in development, in both of which
finer phases of invention O. Henry has been largely
and frequently surpassed, but to the disposition of

* William Sidney Porter, 1862-1910, son of Algernon Sidney-
Porter, physician, was born, bred, and meagerly educated in
Greensboro, North Carolina. In Greensboro he was drug clerk;
in Texas he was amateur ranchman, land-office clerk, editor, and
bank teller. Convicted of misuse of bank funds on insufficient
evidence (which he supplemented by the insanity of flight), he
passed three years and three months in the Ohio State Peniten-
tiary at Columbus. Release^ was the prelude to life in New
York, to story-writing, to rapid and wide-spread fame. Latterly,
his stories, published in New York journals and in book form,
were consumed by the public with an avidity which his prema-
ture death, in iqto, scarcely checked. The pen-name, O. Henry,
is almost certainly borrowed from a French chemist, Etienne-
Ossian Henry, whose abridged name he fell upon in his phar-
macal researches. See the interesting "O. Henry Biography" by
C. Alphonso Smith.

102 O. W. Firkins

masses, to the blocking-out of plots. That a half«
educated American provincial should have been orig-
inal in a field in which original men have been copy-
ists is enough of itself to make his personality ob-
servable.

Illustration, even of conceded truths, is rarely super-
fluous. I supply two instances. Two lads, parting in
New York, agree to meet ''After Twenty Years" at
a specified hour, date, and corner. Both are faithful;
but the years in which their relation has slept in mutual
silence and ignorance have turned the one into a
dashing criminal, the other into a sober officer of the
law. Behind the picturesque and captivating rendez-
vous lurks a powerful dramatic situation and a moral
problem of arresting gravity. This is dealt wath in
six pages of the "Four Million." The ''Furnished
Room," two stories further on, occupies twelve pages.
Through the wilderness of apartments on the lower
West Side a man trails a woman. Chance leads him
to the very room in which the woman ended her life
the week before. Between him and the truth the
avarice of a sordid landlady interposes the curtain of
a lie. In the bed in which the girl slept and died, the
man sleeps and dies, and the entrance of the deadly
fumes into his nostrils shuts the sinister and mourn-
ful coincidence forever from the knowledge of man-
kind. O. Henry gave these tales neither extension nor

O. Henry 103

prominence; so far as I know, they were received
without bravos or salvos. The distinction of a body
of work in which such specimens are undistinguished
hardly requires comment.

A few types among these stories may be specified.
There are the Sydney Cartonisms, defined in the name;
love-stories in which divided hearts, or simply divided
persons, are brought together by the strategy of chance;
hoax stories— deft pictures of smiling roguery ; "prince
and pauper'' stories, in which wealth and poverty face
each other, sometimes enact each other; disguise
stories, in which the wrong clothes often draw the
wrong bullets; complemental stories, in which Jim
sacrifices his beloved watch to buy combs for Delia,
who, meanwhile, has sacrificed her beloved hair to
buy a chain for Jim.

This imperfect list is eloquent in its way ; it smooths
our path to the assertion that O. Henry's specialty is
the enlistment of original method in the service of
traditional appeals. The ends are the ends of fifty
years ago; O. Henry transports us by aeroplane
the old homestead.*

*0 Henry's stones have been known to coincide with earlier
work in a fashion which dims the novelty of the tale without
clouding the originality of the author. I thought the brilliant
"Harlem Tragedy" (in the "Trimmed Lamp") unique through
sheer audacity, but the other day I found its motive repeated
with singular exactness in Montesa.uieu's "Lettres Persanes
(Letter LI).

t04 O. W, Firkins

Criticism of O. Henry falls into those superlatives
and antitheses in which his own faculty delighted.
In mechanical invention he is almost the leader of his
race. In a related quality — a defect — his leadership
is even more conspicuous. I doubt if the sense of the
probable, or, more precisely, of the available in the
improbable, ever became equally weakened or dead-
ened in a man who made his living by its exercise.
The improbable, even the impossible, has its place
in art, though that place is relatively low; and it is
curious that works such as the ''Arabian Nights" and
Grimm's fairy tales, whose stock-in-trade is the in-
credible, are the works which give almost no trouble
on the score of verisimilitude. The truth is that we
reject not what it is impossible to prove, or even what
it is possible to disprove, but v^hat it is impossible to
imagine. O. Henry asks us to imagine the unimag-
inable— that is his crime.

The right and wTong improbabilities may be illus-
trated from two burglar stories. "Sixes and Sevens"
contains an excellent tale of a burglar and a citizen
who fraternize, in a comic midnight interview, on the
score of their common sufferings from rheumatism.
This feeling in practice would not triumph over fear
and greed; but the feeling is natural, and everybody
with a grain of nature in him can imagine its triumph.
Nature tends towards that impossibility, and art, lift-

O. Henry 105

ing, so to speak, the lid which fact drops upon nature,
reveals nature in belying fact. In another story, in
'Whirligigs," a nocturnal interview takes place in
which a burglar and a small boy discuss the etiquette
of their mutual relation by formulas derived from
short stories with which both are amazingly conversant.
This is the wrong use of the improbable. Even an
imagination inured to the virtues of burglars and the
maturity of small boys will have naught to do with this
insanity.

But O. Henry can go further yet. There are inven-
tions in his tales the very utterance of which — not the
mere substance but the utterance — on the part of a
man not writing from Bedlam or for Bedlam impresses
the reader as incredible. In a *'Comedy in Rubber,"
two persons become so used to spectatorship at trans-
actions in the street that they drift into the part of
spectators when the transaction is their own wedding.
Can human daring or human folly go further? O.
Henry is on the spot to prove that they can. In
the "Romance of a Busy Broker,'* a busy and forget'
ful man, in a freak of absent-mindedness, offers his
hand to the stenographer whom he had married the
night before.

The other day, in the journal of the Goncourts, I
came upon the following sentence: "Never will the
imagination approach the improbabilities and the an*

Io6 O. W. Firkins

titheses of truth" (II, 9). This is dated February 21.
1862. Truth had still the advantage. O. Henry was
not born till September of the same year.

Passing on to style, we are still in the land of anti-
thesis. The style is gross — and fine. Of the plenitude
of its stimulus, there can be no question. In "Sixes
and Sevens," a young man sinking under accidental
morphia, is kept awake and alive by shouts, kicks, and
blows. O. Henry's public seems imaged in that young
man. But I draw a sharp distinction between the tone
of the style and its pattern. The tone is brazen, or,
better perhaps, brassy; its self-advertisement is incor^
rigible; it reeks with that air of performance which \s,
opposed to real efficiency. But the pattern is another
matter. The South rounds its periods like its vowels;
O. Henry has read, not widely, but wisely, in his boy-
hood. His sentences are huilt — a rare thing in the best
writers of to-day. In conciseness, that Spartan virtue,
he was strong, though it must be confessed that the
tale-teller was now and then hustled from the rostrum
by his rival and enemy, the talker. He can introduce
a felicity with a noiselessness that numbers him for
a flying second among the sovereigns of English. *'In
one of the second-floor front windows Mrs. McCaskey
awaited her husband. Supper was cooling on the
table. Its heat went into Mrs. McCaskey."

I regret the tomfoolery; I wince at the slang. Yet

O. Henry 107

even for these levities with which his pages are so
hberally besprinkled or bedaubed, some half-apology
may be circumspectly urged. In nonsense his ease is
consummate. A horseman who should dismount to
pick up a bauble would be childish; O. Henry picks
it up without dismounting. Slang, again, is most
pardonable in the man with whom its use is least ex-
clusive and least necessary. There are men who, going
for a walk, take their dogs with them; there are other
men who give a walk to their dogs. Substitute slang
for the dog, and the superiority of the first class to
the second will exactly illustrate the superiority of
O. Henry to the abject traffickers in slang.

In the 'Tendulum" Katy has a new patch in her
crazy quilt which the ice man cut from the end of
his four-in-hand. In the "Day We Celebrate," thread-
ing the mazes of a banana grove is compared to ''pag-
ing the palm room of a New York hotel for a man
named Smith." O. Henry's is the type of mind to
which images like this four-in-hand and this palm room
are presented in exhaustless abundance and unflagging
continuity. There was hardly an object in the merry-
go-round of civilized life that had not offered at least
an end or an edge to the avidity of his consuming
eyes. Nothing escapes from the besom of his allu-
siveness, and the style is streaked and pied, almost to
monotony, by the accumulation of lively details.

lo8 O. TV. Firkins

If O. Henry's style was crude, it was also rare; but
it is part of the grimness of the bargain that destiny
drives with us that the mixture of the crude and the
rare should be a crude mixture, as the sons of whites
and negroes are numbered with the blacks. In the
kingdom of style O. Henry's estates were princely,
but, to pay his debts, he must have sold them all.

Thus far in our inquiry extraordinary merits have
been offset by extraordinary defects. To lift our
author out of the class of brilliant and skilful enter-
tainers, more is needed. Is more forthcoming? I
should answer, yes. In O. Henry, above the knowl-
edge of setting, which is clear and first-hand, but
subsidiary, above the order of events, which is, gen-
erally speaking, fantastic, above the emotions, which
are sound and warm, but almost purely derivative,
there is a rather small, but impressive body of first-
hand perspicacities and reactions. On these his en-
durance may hinge.

I name, first of all, O. Henry's feeling for New York.
With the exception of his New Orleans, I care little
for his South and West, which are a boyish South
and West, and as little, or even less, for his Spanish-
American communities. My objection to his opera-
bouffe republics is, not that they are inadequate as re-
publics (for that we were entirely prepared), but that
they are inadequate as opera. He lets us see his show

O. Henry 109

from the coulisses. The pretense lacks standing even
among pretenses, and a faith must be induced before
its removal can enliven us. But his New York has
quality. It is of the family of Dickens's London and
Hugo's Paris, though it is plainly a cadet in the fam-
ily. Mr. Howells, in his profound and valuable study
of the metropolis in a "Hazard of New Fortunes," is
penetrating; O. Henry, on the other hand, is pene-
trated. His New York is intimate and clinging; it is
caught in the mesh of the imagination.

O. Henry had rare but precious insights into human
destiny and human nature. In these pictures he is not
formally accurate; he could never or seldom set his
truth before us in that moderation and proportion
which truths acquire in the stringencies of actuality.
He was apt to present his insight in a sort of parable
or allegory, to upraise it before the eyes of mankind
on the mast or flagpole of some vehement exaggera-
tion. Epigram shows us truth in the embrace of a He,
and tales which are dramatized epigrams are subject
to a like constraint. The force, however, is real. I
could scarcely name anywhere a more powerful expo-
sition of fatality than "Roads of Destiny," the initial
story in the volume which appropriates its title. It
wanted only the skilled romantic touch of a Gautier
or Stevenson to enroll this tale among the master-
pieces of its kind in contemporary letters.

no O. W, Firkins

Now and then the ingredient of parable is hardly-
perceptible; we draw close to the bare fact. O. Henry,
fortunate in plots, is peculiarly fortunate in his re-
nunciation of plot. If contrivance is lucrative, it is
also costly. There is an admirable little story called
the 'Tendulum" (in the ''Trimmed Lamp"), the sim-
plicity of whose fable would have satisfied Coppee
or Hawthorne. A man in a flat, by force of custom,
has come to regard his wife as a piece of furniture.
She departs for a few hours, and, by the break in
usage, is restored, in his consciousness, to womanhood.
She comes back, and relapses into furniture. That
is all. O. Henry could not have given us less — or
more. Farcical, clownish, if you will, the story re-
sembles those clowns who carry daggers under their
motley. When John Perkins takes up that inauspicious
hat, the reader smiles, and quails. I will mention a
few other examples of insights with the proviso that
they are not specially commended to the man whose
quest in the short story is the electrifying or the cal-
orific. They include the ''Social Triangle," the "Mak-
ing of a New Yorker," and the "Foreign Policy of
Company 99," all in the "Trimmed Lamp," the "Brief
Debut of Tildy" in the "Four Million," and the "Com-
plete Life of John Hopkins" in the "Voice of the
City." I cannot close this summary of good points
without a passing reference to the not unsuggestive

O. Henry lit

portrayal of humane and cheerful scoundrels in the
''Gentle Grafter." The picture, if false to species, is
faithful to genus.

O. Henry's egregiousness, on the superficial side,
both in merits and defects, reminds us of those park
benches so characteristic of his tales which are occu-
pied by a millionaire at one end and a mendicant at
the other. But, to complete the image, we must add
as a casual visitor to that bench a seer or a student,
who, sitting down between the previous comers and
suspending the flamboyancies of their dialogue, should
gaze with the pensive eye of Goldsmith or Addison
upon the passing crowd.

In O. Henry American journalism and the Victorian
tradition meet. His mind, quick to don the guise of
modernity, was impervious to its spirit. The specifi-
cally modern movements, the scientific awakening, the
religious upheaval and subsidence, the socialistic gospel,
the enfranchisement of women — these never interfered
with his artless and joyous pursuit of the old romantic
motives of love, hate, wealth, poverty, gentility, dis-
guise, and crime. On two points a moral record which,
in his literature, is everywhere sound and stainless,
rises almost to nobility. In an age when sexual excite-
ment had become available and permissible, this wor-
shiper of stimulus never touched with so much as a
fingertip that insidious and meretricious fruit. The

112 O. W. Firkins

second point is his feeling for underpaid working-girls.
His passionate concern for this wrong derives a
peculiar emphasis from the general refusal of his books
to bestow countenance or notice on philanthropy in its
collective forms. When, in his dream of Heaven, he
is asked: "Are you one of the bunch?" (meaning one
of the bunch of grasping and grinding employers),
the response, through all its slang, is soul-stirring.
" 'Not on your immortality,' said I. 'I'm only the
fellow that set fire to an orphan asylum and murdered
a blind man for his pennies.' " The author of that
retort may have some difficulty with the sentries that
watch the entrance of Parnassus; he will have none
with the gatekeeper of the New Jerusalem.

THE MOWING OF A FIELD

By HiLAiRE Belloc

We have not had in our time a more natural-born essayist, of
the scampering sort, than Hilaire Belloc. He is an infectious
fellow: if you read him much you will find yourself trying to
imitate him; there is no harm in doing so: he himself caught
the trick from Rabelais. I do not propose to rehash here the
essay I wrote about him in a book called Shandygaff. You can
refer to it there, which will be good business all round. I know
it is a worthy essay, for much of it was cribbed from an article
by Mr. Thomas Seccombe, which an American paper lifted from
the English journal which, presumably, paid Mr. Seccombe for
it. I wrote it for the Boston Transcript, where I knew the
theft would be undetected ; and in shoveling together some stuff
for a book (that was in 1917, the cost of living was rising at an
angle of forty-five degrees, as so many graphs have shown) I put
it in, forgetting (until too late) that some of it was absolute
plunder.

Mr. Chesterton once said something like this: "It is a mistake
to think that thieves do not respect property. They only wish
it to become their property, so that they may more perfectly re-
spect it."

And by the way, Alax Beerbohm's parody of Belloc, in A
Christmas Garland, is something not to be missed. It is one
of the best proofs that Belloc is a really great artist. Beerbohm
does not waste his time mimicking the small fry.

Hilaire Belloc — son of a French father and an English mother;
his happy junction of both English and French genius in prose
is hereditary — was born in France in 1870. He lived in Sussex
as a child; served in the French field artillery; was at Balliol
College, Oxford, 1893-Q5, and sat four j^ears (1906-10) in the
House of Commons. Certainly you must read (among his gath-
erings of essays) On Nothing, On Everything, On Something,
Hills and the Sea, First and Last; then you can read The Path
ta Rome, and The Four Men, and Calibans Guide to Letters
and_ The Pyrenees and Marie Antoinette. If you desire the
bouillon (or bullion) of his charm, there is A Picked Company,
a selection (by Mr. E. V. Lucas) of his most representative work.
It is published by Methuen and Company, 36 Essex Street W. C,
London.

Having done so, come again: we will go off in a comer and
talk about Mr. Belloc.

114 Hi I aire Belloc

There is a valley in South England remote from
ambition and from fear, where the passage of
strangers is rare and unperceived, and where the scent
of the grass in summer is breathed only by those who
are native to that unvisited land. The roads to the
Channel do not traverse it; they choose upon either
side easier passes over the range. One track alon(
leads up through it to the hills, and this is changeable ;
now green where men have little occasion to go, now
a good road where it nears the homesteads and the
barns. The woods grow steep above the slopes; they
reach sometimes the very summit of the heights, or,
when they cannot attain them, fill in and clothe the
coombes. And, in between, along the floor of the val-
ley, deep pastures and their silence are bordered by
lawns of chalky grass and the small yew trees of the
Downs.

The clouds that visit its sky reveal themselves beyond
the one great rise, and sail, white and enormous, to the
other, and sink beyond that other. But the plains
above which they have traveled and the Weald to
which they go, the people of the valley cannot see and
hardly recall. The wind, when it reaches such fields,
is no longer a gale from the salt, but fruitful and soft,
an inland breeze ; and those whose blood was nourished
here feel in that wind the fruitfulness of our orchards
and all the life that all things draw from the air.

The Mowing of a Field 115

In this place, when I was a boy, I pushed through a
fringe of beeches that made a complete screen between
me and the world, and I came to a glade called No
Man's Land. I climbed beyond it, and I was surprised
and glad, because from the ridge of that glade, I saw
the sea. To this place very lately I returned.

The many things that I recovered as I came up the
countryside were not less charming than when a dis-
tant memory had enshrined them, but much more.
Whatever veil is thrown by a longing recollection had
not intensified nor even made more mysterious the
beauty of that happy ground; not in my very dreams
of morning had I, in exile, seen it more beloved or
more rare. Much also that I had forgotten now re-
turned to me as I approached — a group of elms, a little
turn of the parson's wall, a small paddock beyond the
graveyard close, cherished by one man, with a low
wall of very old stone guarding it all round. And all
these things fulfilled and amplified my delight, till even
the good vision of the place, which I had kept so many
years, left me and was replaced by its better reality.
"Here/* I said to myself, "is a symbol of what some
say is reserved for the soul : pleasure of a kind which
cannot be imagined save in a moment when at last it is
attained."

When I came to my own gate and my own field, and
had before me the house I knew. I looked around a

Ii6 Hilaire Belloc

little (though it was already evening), and I saw that
the grass was standing as it should stand when it is
ready for the scythe. For in this, as in everything
that a man can do — of those things at least which are
very old — there is an exact moment when they are
done best. And it has been remarked of whatever rules
us that it works blunderingly, seeing that the good
things given to a man are not given at the precise mo-
nent when they would have filled him with delight.
But, whether this be true or false, we can choose the
just turn of the seasons in everything we do of our
own will, and especially in the making of hay. Many
think that hay is best made when the grass is thickest ;
and so they delay until it is rank and in flower, and
has already heavily pulled the ground. And there is
another false reason for delay, which is wet weather.
For very few will understand (though it comes year
after year) that we have rain always in South Eng-
land between the sickle and the scythe, or say just after
the weeks of east wind are over. First we have a
week of sudden warmth, as though the south had come
to see us all; then we have the weeks of east and south-
east wind; and then we have more or less of that rain
of which I spoke, and which always astonishes the
world. Now it is just before, or during, or at the
very end of that rain — but not later — that grass should
be cut for hay. True, upland grass, which is always

The Mowing of a Field 117

thin, should be cut earlier than the grass in the bot-
toms and along the water meadows; but not even the
latest, even in the wettest seasons, should be left (as
it is) to flower and even to seed. For what we get
when we store our grass is not a harvest of something
ripe, but a thing just caught in its prime before ma-
turity: as witness that our corn and straw are best
yellow, but our hay is best green. So also Death
should be represented with a scythe and Time with a
•sickle ; for Time can take only what is ripe, but Death
comes always too soon. In a word, then, it is always
much easier to cut grass too late than too early ; and
I, under that evening and come back to these pleasant
fields, looked at the grass and knew that it was time.
June was in full advance ; it was the beginning of that
season when the night has already lost her foothold of
the earth and hovers over it, never quite descending,
but mixing sunset with the dawn.

Next morning, before it was yet broad day, I awoke,
and thought of the mowing. The birds were already
chattering in the trees beside my window, all except
the nightingale, which had left and flown away to the
Weald, where he sings all summer by day as well as
by night in the oaks and the hazel spinneys, and espe-
cially along the little river Adur, one of the rivers of
the Weald. The birds and the thought of the mowing
had awakened me, and I went down the stairs and

Il8 Hilaire Belloc

along the stone floors to where I could find a scythe;
and when I took it from its nail, I remembered how,
fourteen years ago, I had last gone out with my scythe,
just so, into the fields at morning. In between that
day and this were many things, cities and armies, and
a confusion of books, mountains and the desert, and
horrible great breadths of sea.

When I got out into the long grass the sun was not
yet risen, but there were already many colors in the
eastern sky, and I made haste to sharpen my scythe,
so that I might get to the cutting before the dew should
dry. Some say that it is best to wait till all the dew
has risen, so as to get the grass quite dry from the very
first. But, though it is an advantage to get the grass
quite dry, yet it is not worth while to wait till the dew
has risen. For, in the first place, you lose many hours
of work (and those the coolest), and next — which is
more important — you lose that great ease and thickness
in cutting which comes of the dew. So I at once began
to sharpen my scythe.

There is an art also in the sharpening of the scythe,
and it is worth describing carefully. Your blade must
be dry, and that is why you will see men rubbing the
scythe-blade with grass before they whet it. Then
also your rubber must be quite dry, and on this account
it is a good thing to lay it on your coat and keep it
there during all your day's mowing. The scythe you

The Mowing of a Field II9

stand upright, with the blade pointing away from you,
and put your left hand firmly on the back of the blade,
grasping it: then you pass the rubber first down one
side of the blade-edge and then down the other, begin-
ning near the handle and going on to the point and
working quickly and hard. When you first do this you
will, perhaps, cut your hand; but it is only at first
that such an accident will happen to you.

To tell when the scythe is sharp enough this is the
rule. First the stone clangs and grinds against the
iron harshly ; then it rings musically to one note ; then,
at last, it purrs as though the iron and stone were ex-
actly suited. When you hear this, your scythe is
sharp enough ; and I, when I heard it that June dawn,
with everything quite silent except the birds, let down
the scythe and bent myself to mow.

When one does anything anew, after so many years,
one fears very much for one's trick or habit. But all
things once learnt are easily recoverable, and I very
soon recovered the swing and power of the mower.
Mowing w ell and mowing badly — or rather not mow-
ing at all — are separated by very little ; as is also true
of writing verse, of playing the fiddle, and of dozens
of other things, but of nothing more than of believing.
For the bad or young or untaught mower without
tradition, the mower Promethean, the mower original
and contemptuous of the past, does all these things:

I20 Hilaire Belloc

He leaves great crescents of grass uncut. He digs the
point of the scythe hard into the ground with a jerk.
He loosens the handles and even the fastening of the
blade. He twists the blade with his blunders, he blunts
the blade, he chips it, dulls it, or breaks it clean off at
the tip. If any one is standing by he cuts him in the
ankle. He sweeps up into the air wildly, with nothing
to resist his stroke. He drags up earth with the grass,
which is like making the meadow bleed. But the
good mower who does things just as they should be
done and have been for a hundred thousand years, falls
into none of these fooleries. He goes forward very
steadily, his scythe-blade just barely missing the
ground, every grass falling; the swish and rhythm of
his mowing are always the same.

So great an art can only be learnt by continual prac-
tice; but this much is worth writing down, that, as in
all good work, to know the thing with which you work
is the core of the affair. Good verse is best written on
good paper with an easy pen, not with a lump of coal
on a whitewashed wall. The pen thinks for you; and
so does the scythe mow for you if you treat it honorably
and in a manner that makes it recognize its service.
The manner is this. You must regard the scythe as a
pendulum that swings, not as a knife that cuts. A
good mower puts no more strength into his stroke than
into his lifting. Again, stand up to your work. The

The Mowing of a Field 12 £

bad mower, eager and full of pain, leans forward and
tries to force the scythe through the grass. The good
mower, serene and able, stands as nearly straight as
the shape of the scythe will let him, and follows up
every stroke closely, moving his left foot forward.
Then also let every stroke get well away. Mowing is
a thing of ample gestures, like drawing a cartoon.
Then, again, get yourself into a mechanical and repeti-
tive mood : be thinking of anything at all but your
mowing, and be anxious only when there seems some
interruption to the monotony of the sound. In this
mowing should be like one's prayers — all of a sort and
always the same, and so made that you can establish
a monotony and work. them, as it were, with half your
mind : that happier half, the half that does not bother.
In this way, when I had recovered the art after so
many years, I went forward over the field, cutting lane
after lane through the grass, and bringing out its most
secret essences with the sweep of the scythe until the
air was full of odors. At the end of every lane I
sharpened my scythe and looked back at the work done,
and then carried my scythe down again upon my
shoulder to begin another. So, long before the bell
fang in the chapel above me — ^that is, long before six
o'clock, which is the time for the Angelus — I had many
swathes already lying in order parallel like soldiery;
and the high grass yet standing, making a great con-

122 Hilaire Be Hoc

trast with the shaven part, looked dense and high. As
it says in the Ballad of Val-es-Dunes, where —
The tall son of the Seven Winds
Came riding out of Hither-hythe,
and his horse-hoofs (you will remember) trampled
into the press and made a gap in it, and his sword (as
you know)

was like a scythe
In Arcus when the grass is high
And all the swathes in order lie,
And there's the bailiff standing by
A-gathering of the tithe.
So I mowed all that morning, till the houses awoke
in the valley, and from some of them rose a little
fragrant smoke, and men began to be seen.

I stood still and rested on my scythe to watch the
awakening of the village, when I saw coming up to
my field a man whom I had known in older times,
before I had left the Valley.

He was of that dark silent race upon which all the
learned quarrel, but which, by whatever meaningless
name it may be called — Iberian, or Celtic, or what you
will — is the permanent root of all England, and makes
England wealthy and preserves it everywhere, except
perhaps in the Fens and in a part of Yorkshire. Every-
where else you will find it active and strong. These
people are intensive; their thoughts and their labors

The Mowing of a Field 123

turn inward. It is on account of their presence in
these islands that our gardens are the richest in the
world. They also love low rooms and ample fires and
great warm slopes of thatch. They have, as I be-
lieve, an older acquaintance with the English air than
any other of all the strains that make up England.
They hunted in the Weald with stones, and camped in
the pines of the green-sand. They lurked under the
oaks of the upper rivers, and saw the legionaries go up,
up the straight paved road from the sea. They helped
the few pirates to destroy the towns, and mixed with
those pirates and shared the spoils of the Roman villas,
and were glad to see the captains and the priests de-
stroyed. They remain; and no admixture of the
Frisian pirates, or the Breton, or the Angevin and
Norman conquerors, has very much affected their
cunning eyes.

To this race, I say, belonged the man who now ap-
proached me. And he said to me, "Mowing?" And I
answered, "Ar," Then he also said *'Ar," as in duty
bound; for so we speak to each other in the Stenes of
the Downs.

Next he told me that, as he had nothing to do, he
would lend me a hand ; and I thanked him warmly, or,
as we say, "kindly.*' For it is a good custom of ours
always to treat bargaining as though it were a cour-
teous pastime; and though what he was after was

124 Hilaire Belloc

money, and what I wanted was his labor at the least
pay, yet we both played the comedy that we were free
men, the one granting a grace and the other accepting
it. For the dry bones of commerce, avarice and method
and need, are odious to the Valley; and we cover them
tip with a pretty body of fiction and observances. Thus,
when it comes to buying pigs, the buyer does not begin
to decry the pig and the vendor to praise it, as is the
custom w^ith lesser men; but tradition makes them do
business in this fashion: —

First the buyer will go up to the seller when he sees
him in his own steading, and, looking at the pig with
admiration, the buyer will say that rain may or may
not fall, or that we shall have snow or thunder, accord-
ing to the time of the year. Then the seller, looking
critically at the pig, will agree that the weather is as
his friend maintains. There Is no haste at all; great
leisure marks the dignity of their exchange. And the
next step is, that the buyer says: 'That's a fine pig

you have there, Mr. " (giving the seller's name).

"Ar, powerful fine pig." Then the seller, saying also
"Mr." (for twin brothers rocked in one cradle give
each other ceremonious observance here), the seller, I
say, admits, as though with reluctance, the strength
and beauty of the pig, and falls Into deep thought.
Then the buyer says, as though moved by a great
desire, that he is ready to give so much for the pig,

The Mowing of a Field 125

naming half the proper price, or a Httle less. Then the
seller remains in silence for some moments; and at
last begins to shake his head slowly, till he says: "I
don't be thinking of selling the pig, anyways." He
will also add that a party only Wednesday offered him
so much for the pig — and he names about double the
proper price. Thus all ritual is duly accomplished;
and the solemn act is entered upon with reverence and
in a spirit of truth. For when the buyer uses this
phrase: "I'll tell you what I will do," and offers
within half a crown of the pig's value, the seller replies
that he can refuse him nothing, and names half a
crown above its value; the difference is split, the pig
is sold, and in the quiet soul of each runs the peace
of something accomplished.

Thus do we buy a pig or land or labor or malt or
lime, always with elaboration and set forms; and
many a London man has paid double and more for
his violence and his greedy haste and very unchivalrous
higgling. As happened with the land at Underwal-
tham, which the mortgagees had begged and implored
the estate to take at twelve hundred and had privately
offered to all the world at a thousand, but which a
sharp direct man, of the kind that makes great for-
tunes, a man in a motor-car, a man in a fur coat, a
man of few words, bought for two thousand three
hundred before my very eyes, protesting that they

126 Hilaire Belloc

might take his offer or leave it ; and all because he did
not begin by praising the land.

Well then, this man I spoke of offered to help me,
and he went to get his scythe. But I went into this
house and brought out a gallon jar of small ale for
him and for me; for the sun was now very warm, and
small ale goes well with mowing. When we had drunk
some of this ale in mugs called "I see you,*' we took
each a swathe, he a little behind me because he was
the better mower; and so for many hours we swung,
one before the other, mowing and mowing at the tall
grass of the field. And the sun rose to noon and we
were still at our mowing; and we ate food, but only
for a little while, and we took again to our mowing.
And at last there was nothing left but a small square of
grass, standing like a square of linesmen who keep
their formation, tall and unbroken, with all the dead
lying around them when the battle is over and done.

Then for some little time I rested after all those
hours; and the man and I talked together, and a long
way off we heard in another field the musical sharpen-
ing of a scythe.

The sunlight slanted powdered and mellow over the
breadth of the valley; for day was nearing its end.
I went to fetch rakes from the steading; and when I
had come back the last of the grass had fallen, and
all the field lay fiat and smooth, with the very green

The Mowing of a Field 127

short grass in lanes between the dead and yellow
swathes.

These swathes we raked into cocks to keep them
from the dew against our return at daybreak ; and we
made the cocks as tall and steep as we could, for in
that shape they best keep off the dew, and it is easier
also to spread them after the sun has risen. Then we
raked up every straggling blade, till the whole field
was a clean floor for the tedding and the carrying of
the hay next morning. The grass we had mown was
but a little over two acres ; for that is all the pasture
on my little tiny farm.

When we had done all this, there fell upon us the
beneficent and deliberate evening ; so that as we sat a
little while together near the rakes, we saw the valley
more solemn and dim around us, and all the trees and
hedgerows quite still, and held by a complete silence.
Then I paid my companion his wage, and bade him a
good night, till we should meet in the same place
before sunrise.

He went off with a slow and steady progress, as all
our peasants do, making their walking a part of the
easy but continual labor of their lives. But I sat on,
watching the light creep around towards the north and
change, and the waning moon coming up as though by
stealth behind the woods of No Man's Land.

THE STUDENT LIFE
By William Osler

Sir William Osier, one of the best-loved and most influential
teachers of his time, was born in Canada in 1849. He began
his education in Toronto and at McGill University, Montreal,
where he served as professor of medicine. 1874-84. Wherever
he worked his gifted and unique personality was a center of
inspiration — at the University of Pennsylvania, 1884-89; at Johns
Hopkins, 1889-1904. In 1904 he went to Oxford as Regius Pro-
fessor of Medicine; he died in England in 1919.

Only our medical friends have a right to speak of the great
doctor's place in their own world ; but one would like to see his
honorable place as a man of letters more generally understood.
His generous wisdom and infectious enthusiasm are delightfully
expressed in his collected writings. No lover of the essay can
afiford to overlook JEquanimitas and Other Addresses, An Ala-
bama Student and Other Biographical Essays, Science and Im-
mortality and Counsels and Ideals, this last an anthology col-
lected from his professional papers by one of his pupils. He
stands in the honorable line of those great masters who have
found their highest usefulness as kindly counselors of the young.
His lucid and exquisite prose, with its extraordinary wealth of
quotation from the literature of all ages, and his unfailing humor
and tenderness, put him in the first rank of didactic essayists.
One could get a liberal education in literature merely by follow-
ing up all his quotations and references. He was more deeply
versed in the classics than many professors of Greek and Latin ;
the whole music of English poetry seemed to be current in his
blood. His essay on Keats, taken with Kipling's wonderful
story Via Wireless, tells the student more about that poet than
many a volume of biography. When was biography more delight-
fully written than in his volume An Alabama Student?

Walt Whitman said, when Dr. Osier attended him years ago,
"Osier believes in the gospel of encouragement — of putting the
best construction on things — the best foot forward. He's a fine
fellow and a wise one, I guess." The great doctor's gospel
of encouragement is indeed a happy companion for the midnight
reader. Rich in every gentle quality that makes life endeared,
his books are the most sagacious and helpful of modern writings
for the young student. As one who has found them an unfail-
ing delight, I venture to hope that our medical confreres may
not be the only readers to enjoy their vivacity and charm.

128

The Student Life 129

Except it be a lover, no one is more interesting as
an object of study than a student. Shakespeare might
have made him a fourth in his immortal group. The
lunatic with his fixed idea, the poet with his fine
frenzy, the lover with his frantic idolatry, and the
student aflame with the desire for knowledge are of
"imagination all comjpact." To an absorbing passion,
a whole-souled devotion, must be joined an enduring
energy, if the student is to become a devotee of the
gray-eyed goddess to whose law his services are bound.
Like the quest of the Holy Grail, the quest of Minerva
is not for all. For the one, the pure life ; for the other,
what Milton calls "a strong propensity of nature."
Here again the student often resembles the poet — he is
born, not made. While the resultant of two molding
forces, the accidental, external conditions, and the
hidden germinal energies, which produce in each one
of us national, family, and individual traits, the true
student possesses in some measure a divine spark which
sets at naught their laws. Like the Snark, he defies
definition, but there are three unmistakable signs by
which you may recognize the genuine article from a
Boojum — an absorbing desire to know the truth, an
unswerving steadfastness in its pursuit, and an open,
honest heart, free from suspicion, guile, and jealousy.

At the outset do not be worried about this big ques-
tion— Truth. It is a very simple matter if each one of

130 William Osier

you starts with the desire to get as much as possible.
No human being is constituted to know the truth, the
whole truth, and nothing but the truth; and even the
best of men must be content with fragments, with
partial glimpses, never the full fruition. In this un-
satisfied quest the attitude of mind, the desire, the
thirst — a thirst that from the soul must rise! — the
fervent longing, are the be-all and the end-all. What
is the student but a lover courting a fickle mistress who
ever eludes his grasp? In this very elusiveness is
brought out his second great characteristic — steadfast-
ness of purpose. Unless from the start the limitations
incident to our frail human faculties are frankly ac-
cepted, nothing but disappointment awaits you. The
truth is the best you can get with your best endeavor,
the best that the best men accept — with this you must
learn to be satisfied, retaining at the same time with
due humility an earnest desire for an ever larger por-
tion. Only by keeping the mind plastic and receptive
does the student escape perdition. It is not, as Charles
Lamb remarks, that some people do not know what to
do with truth when it is offered to them, but the tragic
fate is to reach, after years of patient search, a condi-
tion of mind-blindness in which the truth is not recog-
nized, though it stares you in the face. This can never
happen to a man who has followed step by step the
growth of a truth, and who knows the painful phases

The Student Life 131

of its evolution. It is one of the great tragedies of
life that every truth has to struggle to acceptance
against honest but mind-blind students. Harvey knew
his contemporaries well, and for twelve successive
years demonstrated the circulation of the blood before
daring to pubUsh the facts on which the truth was
based.*

Only steadfastness of purpose and humility enable
the student to shift his position to meet the new condi-
tions in which new truths are born, or old ones modi-
fied beyond recognition. And, thirdly, the honest heart
will keep him in touch with his fellow students, and
furnish that sense of comradeship without which he
travels an arid waste alone. I say advisedly an honest
heart — the honest head is prone to be cold and stern,
given to judgment, not mercy, and not always able to
entertain that true charity which, while it thinketh no
evil, is anxious to put the best possible interpretation
upon the motives of a fellow worker. It will foster,
too, an attitude of generous, friendly rivalry untinged
by the green peril, jealousy, that is the best preventive
of the growth of a bastard scientific spirit, loving
seclusion and working in a lock-and-key laboratory, as
timorous of light as is a thief.

* "These views, as usual, pleased some more, others less ; some
chid and calumniated me, and laid it to me as a crime that I had
dared to depart from the precepts and opinions of all Anato*
mists." — De Motu Cordis, chap. i.

132 William Osier

You have all become brothers in a great society, not
apprentices, since that implies a master, and nothing
should be further from the attitude of the teacher than
much that is meant in that word, used though it be
in another sense, particularly by our French brethren
in a most delightful way, signifying a bond of intel-
lectual filiation. A fraternal attitude is not easy to
cultivate — the chasm between the chair and the bench
is difficult to bridge. Two things have helped to put
up a cantilever across the gulf. The successful teacher
is no longer on a height, pumping knowledge at high
pressure into passive receptacles. The new methods
have changed all this. He is no longer Sir Oracle,
perhaps unconsciously by his very manner antagoniz-
ing minds to whose level he cannot possibly descend,
but he is a senior student anxious to help his juniors.
When a simple, earnest spirit animates a college, there
is no appreciable interval between the teacher and the
taught — both are in the same class, the one a little
more advanced than the other. So animated, the
student feels that he has joined a family whose honor
is his honor, whose welfare is his own, and whose
interests should be his first consideration.

The hardest conviction to get into the mind of a
beginner is that the education upon which he is en-
gaged is not a college course, not a medical course,
but a life course, for which the work of a few years

The Student Life 1 33

under teachers is but a preparation. Whether you will
falter and fail in the race or whether you will be faith-
ful to the end depends on the training before the start,
and on your staying powers, points upon which I need
not enlarge. You can all become good students, a few
may become great students, and now and again one of
you will be found who does easily and well what others
cannot do at all, or very badly, which is John Ferriar's
excellent definition of a genius.

In the hurry and bustle of a business world, which
is the life of this continent, it is not easy to train first-
class students. Under present conditions it is hard to
get the needful seclusion, on which account it is that
our educational market is so full of wayside fruit. I
have always been much impressed by the advice of
St. Chrysostom: "Depart from the highway and
transplant thyself in some enclosed ground, for it is
hard for a tree which stands by the wayside to keep
her fruit till it be ripe." The dilettante is abroad in
the land, the man who is always venturing on tasks for
which he is imperfectly equipped, a habit of mind
fostered by the multiplicity of subjects in the curricu-
lum: and while many things are studied, few are
studied thoroughly. Men will not take time to get to
the heart of a matter. After all, concentration is the
price the modern student pays for success. Thorough-
ness is the most difficult habit to acquire, but it is the

134 William Osier

pearl of great price, worth all the worry and trouble
of the search. The dilettante lives an easy, butterfly
life, knowing nothing of the toil and labor with which
the treasures of knowledge are dug out of the past, or
wrung by patient research in the laboratories. Take,
for example, the early history of this country — how
easy for the student of the one type to get a smatter-
ing, even a fairly full acquaintance with the events of
the French and Spanish settlements. Put an original
document before him, and it might as well be Arabic.
What we need is the other type, the man who knows
the records, who, with a broad outlook and drilled in
what may be called the embryology of history, has yet
a powerful vision for the minutiae of life. It is these
kitchen and backstair men who are to be encouraged,
the men who know the subject in hand in all possible
relationships. Concentration has its drawbacks. It is
possible to become so absorbed in the problem of the
"enclitic (Jf," or the structure of the flagella of the
Trichomonas, or of the toes of the prehistoric horse,
that the student loses the sense of proportion in his
work, and even wastes a lifetime in researches which
are valueless because not in touch with current knowl-
edge. You remember poor Casaubon, in "Middle^
march," whose painful scholarship was lost on this ac-
count. The best preventive to this is to get denational-
ized early. The true student is a citizen of the world,

The Student Life 135

the allegiance of whose soul, at any rate, is too pre-
cious to be restricted to a single country. The great
minds, the great works transcend all limitations of
time, of language, and of race, and the scholar can
never feel initiated into the company of the elect until
he can approach all of life's problems from the cosmo-
politan standpoint. I care not in what subject he may
work, the full knowledge cannot be reached without
drawing on supplies from lands other than his own —
French, English, German, American, Japanese, Rus-
sian, Italian — there must be no discrimination by the
loyal student who should willingly draw from any and
every source with an open mind and a stern resolve to
render unto all their dues. I care not on what stream of
knowledge he may embark, follow up its course, and
the rivulets that feed it flow from many lands. If the
work is to be effective he must keep in touch with
scholars in other countries. How often has it hap-
pened that years of precious time have been given to a
problem already solved or shown to be insoluble, be-
cause of the ignorance of what had been done else-
where. And it is not only book knowledge and jour-
nal knowledge, but a knowledge of men that is needed.
The student will, if possible, see the men in other lands.
Travel not only widens the vision and gives certainties
in place of vague surmises, but the personal contact
with foreign workers enables him to appreciate better

136 William Osier

the failings or successes in his own line of work, per-
haps to look with more charitable eyes on the work of
some brother whose limitations and opportunities have
been more restricted than his own. Or, in contact with
a mastermind, he may take fire, and the glow of the
enthusiasm may be the inspiration of his life. Concen-
tration must then be associated with large views on the
relation of the problem, and a knowledge of its status
elsewhere; otherwise it may land him in the slough of
a specialism so narrow that it has depth and no breadth,
or he may be led to make what he believes to be impor-
tant discoveries, but which have long been current coin
in other lands. It is sad to think that the day of the
great polymathic student is at an end; that we may,
perhaps, never again see a Scaliger, a Haller, or a
Humboldt — men who took the w^hole field of knowl-
edge for their domain and viewed it as from a pinnacle.
And yet a great specializing generalist may arise, who
can tell? Some twentieth-century Aristotle may be
now tugging at his bottle, as little dreaming as are his
parents or his friends of a conquest of the mind, beside
which the wonderful victories of the Stagirite will look
pale. The value of a really great student to the country
is equal to half a dozen grain elevators or a new trans-
continental railway. He is a commodity singularly
fickle and variable, and not to be grown to order. So
far as his advent is concerned there is no telling: when

The Student Life 137

or where he may arise. The conditions seem to be
present even under the most unHkely externals. Some
of the greatest students this country has produced have
come from small villages and country places. It is
impossible to predict from a study of the environ-
ment, which a "strong propensity of nature," to
quote Milton^s phrase again, will easily bend or
break.

The student must be allowed full freedom in his
work, undisturbed by the utilitarian spirit of the Philis-
tine, who cries, Cui bono? and distrusts pure science.
The present remarkable position in applied science and
in industrial trades of all sorts has been made possible
by men who did pioneer work in chemistry, in physics,
in biology, and in physiology, without a thought in their
researches of any practical application. The members
of this higher group of productive students are rarely
understood by the common spirits, who appreciate as
little their unselfish devotion as their unworldly neglect
of the practical side of the problems.

Everywhere now the medical student is welcomed as
an honored member of the guild. There was a time,
I confess, and it is within the memory of some of us,
when, like Falstaff, he was given to "taverns and sack
and wine and metheglins, and to drinkings and swear-
ings and starings, pribbles and prabbles" ; but all that
has changed with the curriculum, and the "Meds" no\i*

138 William Osier

roar you as gently as the "Theologs.*' On account of
the peculiar character of the subject-matter of your
studies, what I have said upon the general life and
mental attitude of the student applies with tenfold
force to you. Man, with all his mental and bodily
anomalies and diseases — the machine in order, the ma-
chine in disorder, and the business yours to put it to
rights. Through all the phases of its career this most
complicated mechanism of this wonderful world will
be the subject of our study and of your care — the
naked, new-born infant, the artless child, the lad and
the lassie just aware of the tree of knowledge over-
head, the strong man in the pride of life, the woman
with the benediction of maternity on her brow, and the
aged, peaceful in the contemplation of the past. Almost
everything has been renewed in the science and in the
art of medicine, but all through the long centuries
there has been no variableness or shadow of change
in the essential features of the life which is our con-
templation and our care. The sick love-child of Israel's
sweet singer, the plague-stricken hopes of the great
Athenian statesman, Elpenor, bereft of his beloved
Artemidora, and 'Tully's daughter mourned so
tenderly," are not of any age or any race — they are
here with us to-day, with the Hamlets, the Ophelias,
and the Lears. Amid an eternal heritage of sorrow
and suffering our work is laid, and this eternal note

The Student Life 129

of sadness would be insupportable if the daily tragedies
were not relieved by the spectacle of the heroism and
devotion displayed by the actors. Nothing will sustain
you more potently than the power to recognize in your
humdrum routine, as perhaps it may be thought, the
true poetry of life — the poetry of the commonplace, of
the ordinary man, of the plain, toilworn woman, with
their loves and their joys, their sorrows and their
griefs. The comedy, too, of life will be spread before
you, and nobody laughs more often than the doctor at
the pranks Puck plays upon the Titanias and the Bot-
toms among his patients. The humorous side is really
almost as frequently turned towards him as the tragic.
Lift up one hand to heaven and thank your stars if
they have given you the proper sense to enable you to
appreciate the inconceivably droll situations in which
we catch our fellow creatures. Unhappily, this is one
of the free gifts of the gods, unevenly distributed, not
bestowed on all, or on all in equal portions. In undue
measure it is not without risk, and in any case in the
doctor it is better appreciated by the eye than expressed
on the tongue. Hilarity and good humor, a breezy
cheerfulness, a nature "sloping toward the southern
side," as Lowell has it, help enormously both in the
study and in the practice of medicine. To many of a
somber and sour disposition it is hard to maintain good
spirits amid the trials and tribulations of the day, and

140 William Osier

yet it is an unpardonable mistake to go about among
patients with a long face.

Divide your attentions equally between books and
men. The strength of the student of books is to sit
still — two or three hours at a stretch — eating the heart
out of a subject with pencil and notebook in hand,
determined to master the details and intricacies,
focussing all your energies on its difficulties. Get ac-
customed to test all sorts of book problems and state-
ments for yourself, and take as little as possible on
trust. The Hunterian "Do not think, but try" atti-
tude of mind is the important one to cultivate. The
question came up one day, when discussing the grooves
left on the nails after fever, how long it took for the
nail to grow out, from root to edge. A majority of
the class had no further interest; a few looked it up
in books ; two men marked their nails at the root with
nitrate of silver, and a few months later had positive
knowledge on the subject. They showed the proper
spirit. The little points that come up in your reading
try to test for yourselves. With one fundamental
difficulty many of you wnll have to contend from the
outset — a lack of proper preparation for really hard
study. No one can have watched successive groups
of young men pass through the special schools with-
out profoundly regretting the haphazard, fragmentary
character of their preliminary education. It does seem

The Student Life 141

too bad that we cannot have a student in his eighteenth
year sufficiently grounded in the humanities and in the
sciences preliminary to medicine — but this is an edu-
cational problem upon which only a Milton or a Locke
could discourse with profit. With pertinacity you can
overcome the preliminary defects and once thoroughly
interested, the work in books becomes a pastime. A
serious drawback in the student life is the self-con-
sciousness, bred of too close devotion to books. A
man gets shy, "dysopic," as old Timothy Bright calls
it, and shuns the looks of men, and blushes like a girl.
The strength of a student of men is to travel — tQ
study men, their habits, character, mode of life, their
behavior under varied conditions, their vices, virtues,
and peculiarities. Begin with a careful observation
of your fellow students and of your teachers; then,
every patient you see is a lesson in much more than the
malady from which he suffers. Mix as much as you
possibly can with the outside world, and learn its ways.
Cultivated systematically, the student societies, the
students' union, the gymnasium, and the outside social
circle will enable you to conquer the diffidence so apt
to go with bookishness and which may prove a very
serious drawback in after-life. I cannot too strongly
impress upon the earnest and attentive men among
you the necessity of overcoming this unfortunate fail-
ing in your student days. It is not easy for every one

142 fFilliam Osier

to reach a happy medium, and the distinction between
a proper self-confidence and "cheek," particularly in
junior students, is not always to be made. The latter
is met with chiefly among the student pilgrims who, in
traveling down the Delectable Mountains, have gone
astray and have passed to the left hand, where lieth the
country of Conceit, the country in which you remember
the brisk lad Ignorance met Christian.

I wish we could encourage on this continent among
our best students the habit of wandering. I do not
know that we are quite prepared for it, as there is still
great diversity in the curricula, even among the lead-
ing schools, but it is undoubtedly a great advantage to
study under different teachers, as the mental horizon is
widened and the sympathies enlarged. The practice
would do much to lessen that narrow '1 am of Paul
and I am of Apollos" spirit which is hostile to the best
interests of the profession.

There is much that I would like to say on the ques- '
tion of work, but I can spare only a few moments for
a word or two. Who will venture to settle upon so
simple a matter as the best time for work? One will
tell us there is no best time ; all are equally good ; and
truly, all times are the same to a man whose soul is
absorbed in some great problem. The other day I
asked Edward Martin, the well-known story-writer,
what time he found best for work. **Not in the eve-

The Student Life 143

ning, and never between meals!" was his answer, which
may appeal to some of my hearers. One works best
at night; another, in the morning; a majority of the
students of the past favor the latter. Erasmus, the
great exemplar, says, "Never work at night; it dulls
the brain and hurts the health." One day, going with
George Ross through Bedlam, Dr. Savage, at that time
the physician in charge, remarked upon two great
groups of patients — those who were depressed in the
morning and those who were cheerful, and he suggested
that the spirits rose and fell with the bodily tempera-
ture— those with very low morning temperatures were
depressed, and vice versa. This, I believe, expresses a
truth which may explain the extraordinary difference
in the habits of students in this matter of the time at
which the best work can be done. Outside of the
asylum there are also the two great types, the student-
lark who loves to see the sun rise, who comes to break-
fast with a cheerful morning face, never so "fit" as at
6 A. M. We all know the type. What a contrast to
the student-owl with his saturnine morning face, thor-
oughly unhappy, cheated by the wretched breakfast
bell of the two best hours of the day for sleep, no ap-
petite, and permeated with an unspeakable hostility to
his vis-a-vis, whose morning garrulity and good hu-
mor are equally offensive. Only gradually, as the day
wears on and his temperature ri?es» does he become

144 William Osier

endurable to himself and to others. But see him really
awake at lo p. m. while our blithe lark is in hopeless
coma over his books, from which it is hard to rouse
him sufficiently to get his boots off for bed, our lean
owl-friend, Saturn no longer in the ascendant, with
bright eyes and cheery face, is ready for four hours of
anything you wish — deep study, or

Heart affluence in discoursive talk,
and by 2 a. m. he will undertake to unsphere the spirit
of Plato. In neither a virtue, in neither a fault we
must recognize these two types of students, differently
constituted, owing possibly — though I have but little
evidence for the belief — to thermal peculiarities.

THE DECLINE OF THE DRAMA
By Stephen Leacock

Nineteen hundred and ten was an important year. Halley's
comet came along, and some predicted the End of the World.
And Stephen Leacock's first humorous book — Literary Lapses —
was published. First humorous book, I said, for Mr. Leacock —
who is professor of political economy at McGill University,
Montreal — had published his Elements of Political Science in
1906.

It seems to me that I have heard that Literary Lapses was
obscurely or privately published in Canada before 1910; that
Mr. John Lane, the famous London publisher, was given a copy
by some one as he got on a steamer to go home to England ;
that he read it on the voyage and cabled an offer for it as soon
as he landed. This is very vague in my mind, but it sounds
probable. At any rate, since that time Professor Leacock's hu-
morous volumes have appeared with gratifying regularity — Non-
sense Novels, Behind the Beyond, etc. ; and some more serious
books too, such as Essays and Literary Studies and The Un-
solved Riddle of Social Justice. One of the unsolved riddles
of social injustice is, why should Professor Leacock be so much
more amusing than most people?

We usually think of him as a Canadian, but he was born in
England in 1869.

Coming up home the other night in my car (the
Guy Street car), I heard a man who was hanging onto
a strap say : "The drama is just turning into a bunch
of talk." This set me thinking; and I was glad that it
did, because I am being paid by this paper to think once
a week, and it is w^earing. Some days I never think
from morning till night.

This decline of the drama is a thing on which I
feel deeply and bitterly; for I am, or I have been,

14s

146 Stephen Leacock

something of an actor myself. I have only been in
amateur work, I admit, but still I have played some
mighty interesting parts. I have acted in Shakespeare
as a citizen, I have been a fairy in *'A Midsummer
Night's Dream," and I was once one end (choice of
ends) of a camel in a pantomime. I have had other
parts too, such as "A Voice Speaks From Within," or
*'A Noise Is Heard Without," or a "Bell Rings From
Behind," and a lot of things like that. I played as
A Noise for seven nights, before crowded houses
where people were being turned away from the door;
and I have been a Groan and a Sigh and a Tumult, and
once I was a "Vision Passes Before the Sleeper."

So when I talk of acting and of the spirit of the
Drama, I speak of what I know.

Naturally, too, I was brought into contact, very
often into quite intimate personal contact, with some of
the greatest actors of the day. I don't say it in any
way of boasting, but merely because to those of us who
love the stage all dramatic souvenirs are interesting.
I remember, for example, that when Wilson Barrett
played "The Bat" and had to wear the queer suit with
the scales, it was I who put the glue on him.

And I recall a conversation with Sir Henry Irving
one night when he said to me, "Fetch me a glass of
water, will you?" and I said, "Sir Henry, it is not only
a pleasure to ^et it but it is to me, as a humble devotee

The Decline of the Drama 147

of the art that you have ennobled, a high privilege.
I will go further — " **Do/' he said. Henry v^as like
that, quick, sympathetic, what we call in French
"vibrant."

Forbes Robertson I shall never forget : he owes me
50 cents. And as for Martin Harvey — I simply cannot
call him Sir John, we are such dear old friends — he
never comes to this town without at once calling in my
services to lend a hand in his production. No doubt
everybody knows that splendid play in which he ap-
pears, called 'The Breed of the Treshams."

There is a torture scene in it, a most gruesome thing.
Harvey, as the hero, has to be tortured, not on the
stage itself, but off the stage in a little room at the
side. You can hear him howling as he is tortured.
Well, it was I who was torturing him. We are so used
to working together that Harvey didn't want to let any-
body do it but me.

So naturally I am a keen friend and student of the
Drama: and I hate to think of it going all to pieces.

The trouble with it is that it is becoming a mere mass
of conversation and reflection: nothmg happens in it;
the action is all going out of it ana there is nothing
left but thought. When actors begin to think, it is
time for a change. They are not fitted for it.

Now in my day — I mean when I was at the apogee
of my reputation (I think that is the word — it may be

148 Stephen Leacock

apologee — I forget) — things were very different.
What we wanted was action — striking, climatic, catas-
trophic action, in which things not only happened, but
happened suddenly and all in a lump.

And we always took care that the action happened
in some place that was worth while, not simply in an
ordinary room with ordinary furniture, the way it is
in the new drama. The scene was laid in a lighthouse
(top story), or in a mad house (at midnight), or in a
power house, or a dog house, or a bath house, in short,
in some place with a distinct local color and atmos-
phere.

I remember in the case of the first play I ever wrote
(I write plays, too) the manager to whom I submitted
it asked me at once, the moment he glanced at it,
*'Where is the action of this laid?" ''It is laid," I an^
swered, "in the main sewer of a great city." "Good,
good," he said ; "keep it there."

In the case of another play the manager said to me,
"What are you doing for atmosphere?" "The opening
act," I said, "is in a steam laundry." "Very good," he
answered as he turned over the pages, "and have you
brought in a condemned cell?" I told him that I had
not. "That's rather unfortunate," he said, "because
we are especially anxious to bring in a condemned cell.
Three of the big theaters have got them this season,
and I think we ought to have it in. Can you do it?"

The Decline of the Drama 149

"Yes/' I said, '1 can, if it's wanted. I'll look through
the cast, and no doubt I can find one at least of them
that ought to be put to death." ''Yes, yes/' said the
manager enthusiastically, "I am sure you can."

But I think of all the settings that we used, the light-
house plays were the best. There is something about a
lighthouse that you don't get in a modern drawing
room. What it is, I don't know ; but there's a differ-
ence. I always have liked a lighthouse play, and never
have enjoyed acting so much, have never thrown my-
self into acting so deeply, as in a play of that sort.

There is something about a lighthouse — the way you
see it in the earlier scenes — with the lantern shining
out over the black waters that suggests security, fidelity,
faithfulness, to a trust. The stage used generally to
be dim in the first part of a lighthouse play, and you
could see the huddled figures of the fishermen and their
wives on the foreshore pointing out to the sea (the
back of the stage).

"See," one cried with his arm extended, "there is
lightning in yon sky." (I was the lightning and that
my cue for it) : "God help all the poor souls at sea
to-night !" Then a woman cried, "Look ! Look ! a boat
upon the reef !" And as she said it I had to rush round
and work the boat to make it go up and down properly.
Then there was more lightning, and some one screamed
out, "Look ! See ! there's a woman in the boat !"

150 Stephen Leacock

There wasn't really ; it was me ; but in the darkness
it was all the same, and of course the heroine herself
couldn't be there yet because she had to be downstairs
getting dressed to be drowned. Then they all cried
out, ''Poor soul! she's doomed," and all the fishermen
ran up and down making a noise.

Fishermen in those plays used to get fearfully ex-
cited ; and what with the excitement and the darkness
and the bright beams of the lighthouse falling on the
wet oilskins, and the thundering of the sea upon the
reef — ah! me, those were plays! That was acting!
And to think that there isn't a single streak of lightning
in any play on the boards this year !

And then the kind of climax that a play like this
used to have! The scene shifted right at the moment
of the excitement, and lo ! we are in the tower, the top
story of the lighthouse, interior scene. All is still and
quiet within, with the bright light of the reflectors
flooding the little room, and the roar of the storm heard
like muffled thunder outside.

The lighthouse keeper trims his lamps. How firm
and quiet and rugged he looks. The snows of sixty
winters are on his head, but his eye is clear and his
grip strong. Hear the howl of the wind as he opens
the door and steps forth upon the iron balcony, eighty
feet above the water, and peers out upon the storm.

"God pity all the poor souls at sea!" he says. (They

The Decline of the Drama 151

all say that. If you get used to it, and get to like it,
you want to hear it said, no matter how often they
say it.) The waves rage beneath him. (I threw it at
him, really, but the effect was wonderful.)

And then, as he comes in from the storm to the still
room, the climax breaks. A man staggers into the
room in oilskins, drenched, wet, breathless. (They
all staggered in these plays, and in the new drama
they walk, and the effect is feebleness itself.) He
points to the sea. "A boat! A boat upon the reef!
With a woman in it."

And the lighthouse keeper knows that it is his only
daughter — the only one that he has — who is being cast
to death upon the reef. Then comes the dilemma.
They want him for the lifeboat; no one can take it
through the surf but him. You know that because the
other man says so himself.

But if he goes in the boat then the great light will
go out. Untended it cannot live in the storm. And
if it goes out — ah! if it goes out — ask of the angry
waves and the resounding rocks of what to-night's
long toll of death must be without the hght!

I wish you could have seen it — you who only see the
drawing-room plays of to-day — the scene when the
lighthouse man draws himself up, calm and resolute,
and says: "My place is here. God's will be done."
And you know that as he says it and turns quietly to

152 Stephen Leacock

his lamps again, the boat is drifting, at that very mo-
ment, to the rocks.

"How did they save her?" My dear sir, if you can
ask that question you little understand the drama as
it was. Save her? No, of course they didn't save her.
What we wanted in the Old Drama was reality and
force, no matter how wild and tragic it might be.
They did not save her. They found her the next day,
in the concluding scene — all that was left of her when
she was dashed upon the rocks. Her ribs were broken.
Her bottom boards had been smashed in, her gunwale
was gone — in short, she was a wreck.

The girl? Oh, yes, certainly they saved the girl.
That kind of thing was always taken care of. You
see just a$ the lighthouse man said "God's will be
done," his eye fell on a long coil of rope, hanging
there. Providential, wasn't it? But then we were not
ashamed to use Providence in the Old Drama. So he
made a noose in it and threw it over the balcony and
hauled the girl up on it. I used to hook her on to it
every night.

A rotten play? Oh, I am sure it must have been.
But, somehow, those of us who were brought up on
that sort of thing, still sigh for it.

AMERICA AND THE ENGLISH TRADITION
By Harry Morgan Ayres

This admirable summary of Anglo-American history first ap-
peared (February, 1920) as an editorial in the Weekly Review.
It seemed to me then, and still does, as a model in that form
of writing, perfect in lucidity, temperance and good sense. Mr.
Ayres is a member of the faculty of Columbia University (De-
partment of English) and also one of the editors of the Weekly
Review. Beowulf, Chaucer, Shakespeare and Seneca seem to
be his favorite hobbies.

To sum up the gist of Anglo-American relations in half a
dozen pages, as Mr. Ayres does here, is surely a remarkable
achievement.

The recently established chair in the history, litera-
ture, and institutions of the United States which is to
be shared among the several universities of Great
Britain, is quite different from the exchange profes-
sorships of sometimes unhappy memory. It is not at
all the idea to carry over one of our professors each
year and indoctrinate him with the true culture at its
source. The occupant of the chair will be, if the an-
nounced intention is carried out, quite as often British
as American, and quite as likely a public man as a
professor. The chief object is to bring to England
a better knowledge of the United States, and a pur-
pose more laudable can scarcely be imagined. Peace
and prosperity will endure in the world in some very

153

154 Harry Morgan Ay res

precise relation to the extent to which England suc-
ceeds in understanding us.

It is not an illusion to suppose that our understand-
ing of the British is on the whole better than theirs of
us. The British Empire is a large and comparatively
simple fact, now conspicuously before the world for a
long time. The United States was, in British eyes,
until recently, a comparatively insignificant fact, yet
vastly more complicated than they imagined. Each, of
course, perfectly knew the faults of the other,
assessed with an unerring cousinly eye. The
American bragged in a nasal whine, the Briton
patronized in a throaty burble. Whoever among
the struggling nations of the world might win,
England saw to it that she never lost; your Yankee
was content with the more ignoble triumphs of mer-
chandising, willing to cheapen life if he could only
add to his dollars. But the excellence of English
political institutions and methods, the charm of Eng-
lish life, the tremendous power of the Empire for pro-
moting freedom and civilization in the world, these
are things which Americans have long recognized and
in a way understood. Anything like an equivalent
British appreciation of America in the large seems
confined to a very few honorable exceptions among
them. Admiration for Niagara, which is half Brit-
ish anyway, or enthusiasm for the "Wild West"—

America and the English Tradition 155

your better-class Englishman always thrills to the
frontier — is no step at all toward rightly appreciat-
ing America.

To no inconsiderable extent this is America's own
fault. She does not present to the world a record
that is easily read. It is obvious, for instance — and
so obvious that it is not often enough stated — that
America has and will continue to have a fundamen-
tally English civilization. English law is the basis of
her law. English speech is her speech, and if with a
difference, it is a difference that the philologist, all
things considered, finds amazingly small. English
literature is her literature — Chaucer and Shakespeare
hers because her blood then coursed indistinguishably
through the English heart they knew so well ; Milton,
Dryden, and the Queen Anne men hers, because she
was still a part of England; the later men hers by
virtue of affectionate acquaintanceship and a gen-
erous and not inconsiderable rivalry. English history,
in short, is her history. The struggles of the thir-
teenth century through which law and parliament cam^
into being, the struggles of the seventeenth centur)i
through which law and parliament came to rule, are
America's struggles upon which she can look back
with the satisfaction that some things that have been
done in the world need never be undone or done over
again, whatever the room for improvement may still

156 Harry Morgan Ayres

be. Americans, no less than British, recognize that
independence was largely an accidental result of a
war which sprang out of a false theory of economics,
but whose conclusion carried with it a lesson in the
management of empire which subsequent history shows
the British to have learned thoroughly and for the
benefit of all concerned. American independence,
however, once established, pointed a way to demo-
cratic freedom which England hastened to follow.
This we know. And yet —

And yet we allow these obvious and fundamental
considerations to become marvelously obscured. We
allow England's failure to solve an insoluble Irish
problem to arouse in us an attitude of mind possibly
excusable in some Irishmen, but wholly inexcusable
in any American. We allow a sentimental regard for
some immigrant from Eastern Europe, who comes to
us with a philosophy bom of conditions that in Eng-
lish-speaking lands ceased to be centuries ago, to make
us pretend to see in him the true expression of Amer-
ica's traditional ideals. We allow ourselves to be far
too easy with the phrase, "He is not pro-German, he
is merely anti-British." Why are they anti-British?
Why should they be permitted to make it falsely ap-
pear that recognition of the English basis of Amer-
ica involves approval of everything that England in

America and the English Tradition 157

her history may or may not have done? Why should
they be allowed to pretend that disapproval of some
particular act of England justifies repudiation of most
of the things by virtue of which we are what we are?
America from the first has been part of the great
English experiment — great because it is capable of
learning from experience.

The world has put a big investment in blood and
treasure, and all that they imply, into the education
of England. It is satisfied — the world's response to
Germany's insolent challenge is the proof of it — that
its pains have been well bestowed. England is more
nearly fit than any other nation to wield the power
that is hers. That is not to deny the peculiar virtues
of other nations; indeed, these virtues have largely
contributed to the result. Italy has educated her;
France has educated her; we have done something;
and Germany. In result, she is not perfect— the Eng-
lish would perhaps least of all assert that — but she
has learned a great deal and held herself steady while
she learned it. It is a bigger job than the world cares
to rmdertake to teach any other nation so much. Nor
would it be at all likely to succeed so well. For what
England has to offer the world in return is not simply
her institutions; it is not merely a formula for the
effective discharge of police duty throughout the world;

158 Harry Morgan Ayres

it is the English freeman, whether he hail from Can-
ada, Australia, Africa, or the uttermost isles of the
sea.

A most adaptable fellow, this freeman, doing all
sorts of work everywhere, and with tremendous
powers of assimilation. Consider him in his origins.
He began by assimilating fully his own weight in
Danes, while remaining an English freeman. He then
perforce accepted a Norman king, as he had accepted
a Danish one, hoping, as always, that the king would
not trouble him too much. But when Norman Wil-
liam, who was very ill-informed about the breed, killed
off most of his natural leaders and harried the rest
into villeiny, how did he manage in a small matter of
two hundred years or so to make an English gentle-
man not only of himself but of all the rag-tag of ad-
venturers who had come over with William and since ?
How did he contrive, out of a band of exiles fleeing
from an Egypt of ecclesiastical tyranny, broken
younger sons, artisans out of a job, speculators, bond-
men, Swedes, Dutchmen, and what not, to make Amer-
ica? Is he one likely to lose his bearings when in his
America the age-old problem again heaves in view?
This is a job he has been working at pretty success-
fully for more than a thousand years. Grant him a
moment to realize himself afresh in the face of it.
Don't expect him to stop and give a coherent explana-

America and the English Tradition 1 59

tion of what he is doing. He wouldn't be the true
son of the English tradition that he is if he could do
that. Perhaps the occupants of the new chair can
do something of the sort for him.

THE RUSSIAN QUARTER
By Thomas Burke

Thomas Burke, a young newspaper man in London, came into
quick recognition with his first book, Nights in Tozvn (published
in America as Nights in London) in 1915. His first really popu-
lar success, however, was Limehouse Nights, less satisfactory
to those who had read the first book, as it was largely a repeti-
tion of the same material in fiction form, (In fact, Mr. Burke
holds what must be almost a record among authors by having
worked over nearly the identical substance in four different
versions — as essays and sketches, in Nights in Town; as
short stories, in Limehouse Nights; as a novel, in Tunnkletoes;
as poetry, in The Song Book of Quong Lee of Limehouse.)

Mr. Burke has specialized on London, and with great ability.
In the Limehouse series his colorings seem just a little too con-
sciously vivid, his roguishness a little too studied, to be quite
satisfying. The Outer Circle, a volume of rambles in the Lon-
don suburbs, is to me more truly a work of art.

I HAD known the quarter for many years before it
interested me. It was not until I was prowling around
on a Fleet Street assignment that I learned to hate it.
A murder had been committed over a cafe in Lupin
Street; a popular murder, fruity, cleverly done, and
with a sex interest. Of course every newspaper and
agency developed a virtuous anxiety to track the cul-
prit, and all resources were directed to that end.
Journalism is perhaps the only profession in which so
fine a public spirit may be found. So it was that the
North Country paper of which I was a hanger-on
flung every available man into the fighting line, and

160

The Russian Quarter l6l

the editor told me that I might, in place of the casual
paragraphs for the London Letter, do something good
on the Vassiloff murder.

It was a night of cold rain, and the pavements were
dashed with smears of light from the shop windows.
Through the streaming streets my hansom leaped ; and
as I looked from the window, and noted the despond-
ent biliousness of Bethnal Green, I realized that the
grass withereth, the flower fadeth.

I dismissed the cab at Brick Lane, and, continuing
the tradition which had been instilled into me by my
predecessor on the London Letter, I turned into one
of the hostelries and had a vodka to keep the cold out.
Little Russia was shutting up. The old shawled
women, who sit at every corner with huge baskets of
black bread and sweet cakes, were departing beneath
umbrellas. The stalls of Osborn Street, usually dressed
with foreign-looking confectionery, were also retir-
ing. Indeed, everybody seemed to be slinking away,
and as I sipped my vodka, and felt it burn me with
raw fire, I cursed news editors and all publics which
desired to read about murders. I was perfectly sure
that I shouldn't do the least good; so I had another,
and gazed through the kaleidoscopic window, rushing
with rain, at the cheerful world that held me.

Oh, so sad it is, this quarter! By day the streets
are a depression, with their frowzy doss-houses and

l62 Thomas Burke

their vapor-baths. Gray and sickly is the light.
Gray and sickly, too, are the leering shops, and gray
and sickly are the people and the children. Every-
thing has followed the grass and the flowers. Child-
hood has no place; so above the roofs you may see
the surly points of a Council School. Such games
as happen are played but listlessly, and each little face
is smirched. The gaunt warehouses hardly support
their lopping heads, and the low, beetling, gabled
houses of the alleys seem for ever to brood on nights
of bitter adventure. Fit objects for contempt by day
they may be, but when night creeps upon London,
the hideous darkness that can almost be touched, then
their faces become very powers of terror, and the
cautious soul, wandered from the comfort of the mam
streets, walks and walks in a frenzy, seeking outlet
and finding none. Sometimes a hoarse laugh will
break sharp on his ear. Then he runs.

Well, I finished my second, and then sauntered out.
As I was passing a cruel-looking passage, a girl stepped
forward. She looked at me. I looked at her. She
had the haunting melancholy of Russia in her face,
but her voice was as the voice of Cockaigne. For she
spoke and said : —

*Tunny-looking little guy, ain't you?"

I suppose I was. So I smiled and said: **We are
as God naade us, old girl.'*

The Russian Quarter 163

She giggled. . . .

I said I felt sure I should do no good on the Vassil-
off murder. I didn't. For just then two of her
friends came out of the court, each with a boy. It
was apparent that she had no boy. I had no idea
what the occasion might be, but the other four marched
ahead, crying, "Come on!" And, surprised, yet know-
ing of no good reason for being surprised, I felt the
girl's arm slip into mine, and we joined the main
column. . . .

That is one of London's greatest charms : it is always
ready to toss you little encounters of this sort, if you
are out for them.

Across the road we went, through mire and puddle,
and down a long, winding court. At about midway
our friends disappeared, and, suddenly drawn to the
right, I was pushed from behind up a steep, fusty
stair. Then I knew where we were going. We were
going to the tenements where most of the Russians
meet of an evening. The atmosphere in these places
is a little more cheerful than that of the ca^es — if you
can imagine a Russian ever rising to cheerfulness.
Most of the girls lodge over the milliners' shops, and
thither their friends resort. Every establishment here
has a piano, for music, with them, is a somber passion
rather than a diversion. You will not hear comic opera,
but if you want to climb the lost heights of melody,

164 Thomas Burke

stand in Bell Yard, and listen to a piano, lost in the
high glooms, wailing the heart of Chopin, or Rubin-
stein or Glazounoff through the fingers of pale, moist
girls, while the ghost of Peter the Painter parades the
naphtha'd highways.

At the top of the stair I was pushed into a dark,
fusty room, and guided to a low, fusty sofa or bed.
Then some one struck a match, and a lamp was lit
and set on the mantelshelf. It fiung a soft, caressing
radiance on its shabby home, and on its mistress, and
on the other girls and boys. The boys were tough
youngsters of the district, evidently very much at
home, smoking Russian cigarettes and settling them-
selves on the bed in a manner that seemed curiously
continental in Cockney toughs. I doubt if you would
have loved the girls at that moment; and yet . . . you
know . . . their black or brassy hair, their untidiness,
and the cotton blouses half-dropped from their tumul-
tuous breasts . . .

The girl who had collared me disappeared for a mo-
ment, and then brought a tray of Russian tea. ''Help
'selves, boys !" We did so, and, watching the others,
I discovered that it was the correct thing to lemon
the ladies' tea for them and stir it well and light their
cigarettes. I did so for Katarina — that was her name
— while she watched me with little truant locks of hair
running everywhere, and a slow, alluring smile

The Russian Quarter i6c

that seemed to hold all the agony and mystery of the
steppes.

The room, on which the wallpaper hung in dank
strips, contained a full-sized bed and a chair bedstead,
a washstand, a samovar, a potpourri of a carpet, and
certain mysteries of feminine toilet. A rickety three-
legged table stood by the window, and Katarina's robes
hung in a dainty riot of frill and color behind the
door, which only shut when you thrust a peg of wood
through a wired catch.

One of the boys sprawled himself, in clumsy luxury,
on the bed, and his girl arranged herself at his side,
and when she was settled her hair tumbled in a shower
of hairpins, and everybody laughed like children. The
other girl went to the piano, and her boy squatted on
the floor at her feet.

She began to play. . . . You would not understand,
I suppose, the intellectual emotion of the situation. It
IS more than curious to sit in these rooms, in the filth-
iest spot in London, and listen to Moszkowsky, Tchai-
kowsky, and Sibelius, played by a factory girl. It is
. . . something indefinable. I had visited similar
places in Stepney before, but then I had not had a
couple of vodkas, and I had not been taken in tow
by an unknown girl. They play and play, while tea
and cigarettes, and sometimes vodka or whisky, go
round; and as the room gets warmer, so does one's

i66 Thomas Burke

sense of smell get sharper; so do the pale faces get
moister; and so does one long more and more for a
breath of cold air from the Ural Mountains. The
best you can do is to ascend to the flat roof, and take
a deep breath of Spitalfields ozone. Then back to the
room for more tea and more music.

Sanya played. . . . Despite the unventilated room,
the greasy appointments, and other details that would
have turned the stomach of Kensington, that girl at
the piano, her dress cunningly disarranged, playing, as
no one would have dreamed she could play, the finer in-
tensities of Wieniawski and Moussorgsky, shook all
sense of responsibility from me. The burdens of life
vanished. News editors and their assignments be
damned. Enjoy yourself, was what the cold, insid-
ious music said. Take your moments when the fates
send them; that was life's best lesson. Snatch the
joy of the fleeting moment. Why ponder on time and
tears ?

Devilish little fingers they were, Sanya's. Her
technique was not perhaps all that it might have been ;
she might not have won the Gold Medal of our white-
shirted academies, but she had enough temperament
to make half a dozen Bechstein Hall virtuosi. From
valse to nocturne, from sonata to prelude, her fancy
ran. With crashing chords she dropped from "L'Au-
tomne Bacchanale" to the Nocturne in E flat; scarcely

The Russian Quarter 167

murmured of that, then tripped elvishly into Mosz-
kowsky's Waltz, and from that she dropped to a song
of Tchaikowsky, almost heartbreaking in its childish
beauty, and then to the lecherous music of the second
act of ''Tristan." Mazurka, polonaise, and nocturne
wailed in the stuffy chamber; her little hands lit up
the enchanted gloom of the place with bright thrills,
until the bed and the dingy surroundings faded into
phantoms and left only two stark souls in colloquy:
Katarina's and mine.

Katarina had settled, I forget how, on the sofa, and
was reclining very comfortably with her head on my
shoulder and both arms about me. We did not talk.
No questions passed as to why we had picked one
another up. There we were, warmed with vodka and
tea, at eleven o'clock at night, five stories above the
clamorous world, while her friend shook the silly souls
out of us. With the shy boldness of my native coun-
try, I stretched a hand and inclosed her fingers. She
smiled; a curious smile that no other girl in London
could have given; not a flushed smile, or a startled
smile, or a satisfied smile, or a coy smile; but a smile
of companionship, which seemed to have realized the
tragedy of our living. So it was that she had, by
slow stages, reached her comfortable position, for as
my hand wandered from finger to wrist, from wrist to
soft, rounded arm, and so inclosed her neck, she slipped

1 68 Thomas Burke

and buried me in an avalanche of flaming, scented
tresses.

Sanya at the piano shot a glance over her shoulder,
a very sad-gay glance ; she laughed, curiously, I almost
said foreignly. I felt somehow as though I had been
taken complete possession of by these people. I hardly
belonged to myself. Fleet Street v^as but a street of
dream. I seemed now to be awake and in an adorable
captivity.

With a final volley of chords, the pianist slid from
the chair, and sat by her boy on the carpet, smoothing
his face with tobacco-stained fingers, and languish-
ing, while her thick, over-ripe lips took his kisses as a
baby bird takes food from its m.other.

We talked — all of us — in jerks and snatches. Then
the oil in the lamp began to give out, and the room
grew dim. Some one said : 'Tlay something !" And
some one said : ''Too tired !'* The girl reclining on
the bed grew snappy. She did not lean for caresses.
She seemed morose, preoccupied, almost impatient.
Twice she snapped up her boy on a casual remark. I
believe I talked vodka'd nonsense. . . .

But suddenly there came a whisper of soft feet on
the landing, and a secret tap at the door. Some one
opened it, and slipped out. One heard the lazy hum
of voices in busy conversation. Then silence; and
some one entered the room and shut the door. One

The Russian Quarter 169

of the boys asked, casually, "What's up?" His ques-
tion was not answered, but the girl who had gone to
the door snapped something in a sharp tone which
might have been either Russian or Yiddish. Katarina
loosened herself from me, and sat up. The girl on
the bed sat up. The three of them spat angry phrases
about, I called over to one of the boys : ''What's
the joke? Anything wrong?" and received a
reply: "Owshdiknow? I ain't a ruddy Russian, am
I?"

Katarina suddenly drew back her flaming face.
*'Here," she said, "you better go."
"Go?"

"Yes — fathead ! Go's what I said."
"But — " I began, looking and feeling like a flab-
bergasted cat.

"Don't I speak plain? Go!"

I suppose a man never feels a finer idiot than when
a woman tells him she doesn't want him. If he ever
does, it is when a woman tells him that she loves him.
Katarina had given me the bullet, and, of course, I felt
a fool; but I derived some consolation from the fact
that the other boys were being told off. Clearly, big
things were in the air, about to happen. Something,
evidently, had already happened. I wondered. . . .
Then I sat down on the sofa, and flatly told Katarina
that I was not going unless I had a reason.

170 Thomas Burke

"Oh," she said, blithely, "ain't you? This is my
room, ain't it? I brought you here, and you stay here
just as long as I choose, and no longer. Who d'you
think you are, saying you won't go ? This is my room.
I let you come here for a drink, and you just got to
go when I say. See ?'*

I was about to make a second stand, when again
there came a stealthy tap at the door, and the whis-
pering of slippered feet. Sanya glided to the door,
opened it, and disappeared. In a moment she came
back, and called, " 'Rina!" Katarina slipped from my
embrace, went to the door, and disappeared too. One
girl and three boys remained — in silence.

Next moment Katarina reappeared, and said some-
thing to Sanya. Sanya pulled her boy by the arm,
and went out. The other girl pushed her boy at the
neck and literally threw him out. Katarina came over
to me, and said : "Go, little fool !"

I said : "Shan't unless I know what the game is."

She stood over me; glared; searched for words to
meet the occasion ; found none. She gestured. I sat
as rigid as an immobile comedian. Finally, she flung
her arms, and swept away. At the door she turned;
"Blasted little fool! He'll do us both in if y 'ain't
careful. You don't know him. Both of us he'll have.
Serveyeh right."

The Russian Quarter 171

She disappeared. I was alone. I heard the sup-sup
of her sHppered feet down the stair.

I got up, and moved to the door. I heard nothing.
I stood by the window, my thoughts dancing a rag-
time. I wondered what to do, and how, and whether.
I wondered what was up exactly. I wondered . . .
well, I just wondered. My thoughts got into a tangle,
sank, and swam, and sank again. Then there was a
sudden struggle and spurt from the lamp, and it went
black out. From a room across the landing a clock
ticked menacingly. I saw, by the thin light from the
window, the smoke of a discarded cigarette curling
up and up to the ceiling like a snake.

I went again to the door, peered down the steep stair
and over the crazy balustrade. Nobody was about ; no
voices. I slipped swiftly down the five flights, met
nobody. I stood in the slobbered vestibule. From
afar I heard the sluck of the waters against the staples
of the wharves, and the wicked hoot of the tugs.

It was then that a sudden nameless fear seized me;
it was that simple terror that comes from nothing but
ourselves. I am not usually afraid of any man or
thing. I am normally nervous, and there are three or
four things that have power to terrify me. But I am
not, I think, afraid. At that moment, however, I was
afraid of everything: of the room I had left, of the

172 Thomas Burke

house, of the people, of the inviting Hghts of the ware-
houses and the threatening shoals of the alleys.

I stood a moment longer. Then I raced into Brick
Lane, and out into the brilliance of Commercial Street.

A WORD FOR AUTUMN
By A A. Milne

This is the sort of urbane pleasantry in which British essayists
are proHfic and graceful. Alan Alexander Milne \yas born in
1882, went to Trinity College, Cambridge ; was editor of Ihe
Granta (the leading undergraduate publication at Cambridge at
that time) ; and plunged into the great whirlpool of London
journalism. He was on the stafif of Punch, 1906-14. ^He has now
collected several volumes of charming essays, and has had con-
siderable success as a playwright: his comedy, Mr Pirn Fosses
Bv recently played a prosperous run in New York. A Word
for Autumn" is from his volume Not That It Matters.

Last night the waiter put the celery on with the
cheese, and I knew that summer was indeed dead.
Other signs of autumn there may be— the reddening
leaf, the chill in the early-morning air, the misty even-
ings—but none of these comes home to me so truly.
There may be cool mornings in July; in a year of
drought the leaves may change before their time; it is
only with the first celery that summer is over.

I knew all along that it would not last. Even in
April I was saying that winter would soon be here.
Yet somehow it had begun to seem possible lately that
a miracle might happen, that summer might drift on
and on through the months— a final upheaval to crown
a wonderful year. The celery settled that. Last night
with the celery autumn came into its own.

173

174 ^- A' Milne

There is a crispness about celer}^ that is of the
essence of October. It is as fresh and clean as a rainy
day after a spell of heat. It crackles pleasantly in the
mouth. Moreover it is excellent, I am told, for the
complexion. One is always hearing of things which
are good for the complexion, but there is no doubt that
celery stands high on the list. After the burns and
freckles of summer one is in need of something. How
good that celery should be there at one's elbow.

A week ago — ("A little more cheese, waiter") — a
week ago I grieved for the dying summer. I won-
dered how I could possibly bear the waiting — the eight
long months till May. In vain to comfort myself with
the thought that I could get through more work in
the winter undistracted by thoughts of cricket grounds
and country houses. In vain, equally, to tell myself
that I could stay in bed later in the mornings. Even
the thought of after-breakfast pipes in front of the
fire left me cold. But now, suddenly, I am reconciled
to autumn. I see quite clearly that all good things
must come to an end. The summer has been splendid,
but it has lasted long enough. This morning I wel-
comed the chill in the air; this morning I viewed the
falling leaves with cheerfulness; and this morning I
said to myself, "Why, of course, I'll have celery for
lunch." ("More bread, waiter.")

"Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness," said

A Word for Autumn 175

Keats, not actually picking out celery in so many
words, but plainly including it in the general blessings
of the autumn. Yet what an opportunity he missed by
not concentrating on that precious root. Apples, grapes,
nuts, and vegetable marrows he mentions specially —
and how poor a selection ! For apples and grapes are
not typical of any month, so ubiquitous are they, veg-
etable marrows are vegetables pour rire and have no
place in any serious consideration of the seasons, while
as for nuts, have we not a national song which asserts
distinctly, ''Here we go gathering nuts in May"?
Season of mists and mellow celery, then let it be. A
pat of butter underneath the bough, a wedge of cheese,
a loaf of bread and — Thou.

How delicate are the tender shoots unfolded layer
by layer. Of what a whiteness is the last baby one
of all, of what a sweetness his flavor. It is well that
this should be the last rite of the meal — finis coronat
opus — so that we may go straight on to the business of
the pipe. Celery demands a pipe rather than a cigar,
and it can be eaten better in an inn or a London tavern
than in the home. Yes, and it should be eaten alone,
for it is the only food which one really wants to hear
oneself eat. Besides, in company one may have to
consider the wants of others. Celery is not a thing
to share with any man. Alone in your country inn you
may call for the celery; but if you are wise you will

176 A. A. Milne

see that no other traveler wanders into the room,
Take warning from one who has learnt a lesson. One
day I lunched alone at an inn, finishing with cheese and
celery. Another traveler came in and lunched too.
We did not speak — I was busy with my celery. From
the other end of the table he reached across for the
cheese. That was all right! it was the public cheese.
But he also reached across for the celery — my private
celery for which I owed. Foolishly — you know how
one does — I had left the sweetest and crispest shoots
till the last, tantalizing myself pleasantly with the
thought of them. Horror! to see them snatched Irom
me by a stranger. He realized later what he had done
and apologized, but of what good is an apology in such
circumstances ? Yet at least the tragedy was not with-
out its value. Now one remembers to lock the door.

Yes, I can face the winter with calm. I suppose I
had forgotten what it was really like. I had been
thinking of the winter as a horrid wet, dreary time
fit only for professional football. Now I can see other
things — crisp and sparkling days, long pleasant even-
ings, cheery fires. Good work shall be done this win-
ter. Life shall be lived well. The end of the summer
is not the end of the world. Here's to October — and,
waiter, some more celery.

"A CLERGYMAN"
By Max Beerbohm

Max Beerbohm, I dare say (and I believe it has been said
before), is the most subtly gifted English essayist since Charles
Lamb. It is not surprising that he has (now for many years)
been referred to as "the incomparable Max," for what other con-
temporary has never once missed fire, never failed to achieve
perfection in the field of his choice? Whether in caricature,
s'hort story, fable, parody, or essay, he has always been con-
summate in grace, tact, insouciant airy precision. I hope you
will not miss "No. 2 The Pines" (in And Even Noiu, from which
this selection also comes), a reminiscence of his first visit to
Swinburne in 1899. That beautiful (there is no other word)
essay shows an even ampler range of Mr. Beerbohm's powers:
a tenderness and lovely grace that remind one, almost against
belief, that the gay youth of the '90's now mellows deliciously
with the end of the fifth decade. He was so enormously old
in 1896, when he published his first book and called it his Works;
he seems much younger now : he is having his first childhood.

This portrait of the unfortunate cleric annihilated by Dr.
Johnson is a triumphant example of the skill with which a
perfect artist can manceuver a trifle, carved like an ivory trinket;
in such hands, subtlety never becomes mere tenuity.

Max Beerbohm was born in London in 1872; studied at Char-
terhouse School and Merton College, Oxford; and was a bril-
liant figure in the Savoy and Yellow Book circles by the^ time
he was twenty-four. His genius is that of the essay in its
purest distillation: a clear cross-section of life as seen through
the lens of self; the pure culture (in the biological sense) of
observing personality.

I have often wondered how it came about (though the matter
is wholly nonpertinent) that Mr. Beerbohm married an Ameri-
can lady — quite a habit with English essayists, by the way:
Hilaire Belloc and Bertrand Russell did likewise. Who's Who
says she was from Memphis, which adds lustre to that admira-
ble city.

He now lives in Italy.

Fragmentary, pale, momentary; almost nothing;
glimpsed and gone; as it were, a faint human hand
thrust up, never to reappear, from beneath the rolling

177

178 Max Beerbohm

waters of Time, he forever haunts my memory and
solicits my weak imagination. Nothing is told of him
but that once, abruptly, he asked a question, and re-
ceived an answer.

This was on the afternoon of April 7th, 1778, at
Streatham, in the well-appointed house of Mr. Thrale.
Johnson, on the morning of that day, had entertained
Boswell at breakfast in Bolt Court, and invited him to
dine at Thrale Hall. The two took coach and arrived
early. It seems that Sir John Pringle had asked Bos-
well to ask Johnson "what were the best English
sermons for style.'* In the interval before dinner,
accordingly, Boswell reeled off the names of several
divines whose prose might or might not win commen-
dation. "Atterbury?" he suggested. ''Johnson : Yes,
Sir, one of the best. Boswell : Tillotson ? Johnson :
Why, not now. I should not advise any one to imi-
tate Tillotson's style; though I don't know; I should
be cautious of censuring anything that has been ap-
plauded by so many sufiFrages. — South is one of the
best, if you except his peculiarities, and his violence,
and sometimes coarseness of language. — Seed has a
very fine style; but he is not very theological. Jortin's
sermons are very elegant. Sherlock's style, too, is
very elegant, though he has not m3.de it his principal
study. — And you may add Smalridge. Boswell: I

(t

^A Clergyman*' 179

like Ogden's Sermons on Prayer very much, both for
neatness of style and subtility of reasoning. Johnson :
I should like to read all that Ogden has written.
Boswell: What I want to know is, what sermons
afford the best specimen of English pulpit eloquence."
Johnson : We have no sermons addressed to the pas-
sions, that are good for anything; if you mean that
kind of eloquence. A Clergyman, whose name I do
not recollect: Were not Dodd's sermons addressed
to the passions? Johnson: They were nothing, Sir,
be they addressed to what they may."

The suddenness of it! Bang! — and the rabbit that
had popped from its burrow was no more.

I know not which is the more startling — the debut
of the unfortunate clergyman, or the instantaneousness
of his end. Why hadn't Boswell told us there was a
clergyman present? Well, we may be sure that so
careful and acute an artist had some good reason.
And I suppose the clergyman was left to take us una-
wares because just so did he take the company. Had
we been told he was there, we might have expected
that sooner or later he would join in the conversation.
He would have had a place in our minds. We may
assume that in the minds of the company around
Johnson he had rib place. He sat forgotten, over-
looked; so that his self-assertion startled every one

i8o Max Beerbohm

just as on Boswell's page it startles us. In John-
son's massive and magnetic presence only some very
remarkable man, such as Mr. Burke, was sharply dis-
tinguishable from the rest. Others might, if they
had something in them, stand out slightly. This un-
fortunate clergyman may have had something in him,
but I judge that he lacked the gift of seeming as if he
had. That deficiency, however, does not account for
the horrid fate that befell him. One of Johnson's
strongest and most inveterate feelings was his ven-
eration for the Cloth. To any one in Holy Orders
he habitually listened with a grace and charming def-
erence. To-day, moreover, he was in excellent good
humor. He was at the Thrales', where he so loved
to be ; the day was fine ; a fine dinner was in close
prospect; and he had had what he always declared
to be the sum of human felicity — a ride in a coach.
Nor was there in the question put by the clergyman
anything likely to enrage him. Dodd was one whom
Johnson had befriended in adversity; and it had al-
ways been agreed that Dodd in his pulpit was very
emotional. What drew the blasting flash must have
been not the question itself, but the manner in which
it was asked. And I think we can guess what that
manner was.

Say the words aloud : ''Were not Dodd's sermons
addressed to the passions?" They are words which,

(t

'A Clergyman'' l8l

if you have any dramatic and histrionic sense, cannot
be said except in a high, thin voice.

You may, from sheer perversity, utter them in a
rich and sonorous baritone or bass. But if you do so,
they sound utterly unnatural. To make them carry
the conviction of human utterance, you have no choice :
you must pipe them.

Remember, now, Johnson was very deaf. Even the
people whom he knew well, the people to whose voices
he was accustomed, had to address him very loudly.
It is probable that this unregarded, young, shy clergy-
man, when at length he suddenly mustered courage to
'cut in,' let his high, thin voice soar too high, inso-
much that it was a kind of scream. On no other
hypothesis can we account for the ferocity with which
Johnson turned and rended him. Johnson didn't, we
may be sure, mean to be cruel. The old lion, startled,
just struck out blindly. But the force of paw and
claws was not the less lethal. We have endless testi-
mony to the strength of Johnson's voice; and the very
cadence of those words, "They were nothing, Sir, be
they addressed to what they may," convinces me that
the old lion's jaws never gave forth a louder roar,
Boswell does not record that there was any further
conversation before the announcement of dinner. Per-
haps the whole company had been temporarily
deafened. But I am not bothering about them. My

1 82 Max Beerbohm

heart goes out to the poor dear clergyman exclu-
sively.

I said a moment ago that he was young and shy;
and I admit that I slipped those epithets in without
having justified them to you by due process of in-
duction. Your quick mind will have already supplied
what I omitted. A man with a high, thin voice, and
without power to impress any one with a sense of his
importance, a man so null in effect that even the reten-
tive mind of Boswell did not retain his very name,
would assuredly not be a self-confident man. Even
if he were not naturally shy, social courage would
soon have been sapped in him, and would in time
have been destroyed, by experience. That he had not
yet given himself up as a bad job, that he still had
faint wild hopes, is proved by the fact that he did
snatch the opportunity for asking that question. He
must, accordingly, have been young. Was he the
curate of the neighboring church? I think so. It
would account for his having been invited. I see
him as he sits there listening to the great Doctor's
pronouncement on Atterbury and those others. He
sits on the edge of a chair in the background. He has
colorless eyes, fixed earnestly, and a face almost as
pale as the clerical bands beneath his somewhat reced-
ing chin. His forehead is high and narrow, his hair
mouse-colored. His hands are clasped tight before

''A Clergyman" 183

him, the knuckles standing out sharply. This con-
striction does not mean that he is steeling himself to
speak. He has no positive intention of speaking.
Very much, nevertheless, is he wishing in the back of
his mind that he could say something — something
whereat the great Doctor would turn on him and say,
after a pause for thought, "Why, yes, Sir. That is
most justly observed" or ''Sir, this has never occurred
to me. I thank you"— thereby fixing the observer for-
ever high in the esteem of all. And now in a flash the
chance presents itself. ''We have," shouts Johnson,
"no sermons addressed to the passions, that are good
for anything." I see the curate's frame quiver with
sudden impulse, and his mouth fly open, and — no, I
can't bear it, I shut my eyes and ears. But audible,
even so, is something shrill, followed by something
thunderous.

Presently I reopen my eyes. The crimson has not
yet faded from that young face yonder, and slowly
down either cheek falls a glistening tear. Shades of
Atterbury and Tillotson ! Such weakness shames the
Established Church. What would Jortin and Smal-
ridge have said? — ^what Seed and South? And, by
the way, who were they, these worthies ? It is a solemn
thought that so little is conveyed to us by names which
to the palseo-Georgians conveyed so much. We dis-
cern a dim, composite picture of a big man in a big

184 Max Beerbohm

wig and a billowing black gown, with a big congre-
gation beneath him. But we are not anxious to hear
what he is saying. We know it is all very elegant.
We know it will be printed and be bound in finely-
tooled full calf, and no palaeo-Georgian gentleman^s
library will be complete without it. Literate people
in those days were comparatively few ; but, bating that,
one may say that sermons were as much in request as
novels are to-day. I wonder, will mankind continue
to be capricious? It is a very solemn thought indeed
that no more than a hundred-and-fifty years hence the
novelists of our time, with all their moral and political
and sociological outlook and influence, will perhaps
shine as indistinctly as do those old preachers, with
all their elegance, now. "Yes, Sir," some great pundit
may be telling a disciple at this moment, "Wells is
one of the best. Galsworthy is one of the best, if
you except his concern for delicacy of style. Mrs.
Ward has a very firm grasp of problems, but is not
very creational. — Caine's books are very edifying. I
should like to read all that Caine has written. Miss
Corelli, too, is very edifying. — And you may add
Upton Sinclair." "What I want to know," says the
disciple, "is, what English novels may be selected as
specially enthralling." The pundit answers: "We have
no novels addressed to the passions that are good
for anything, if you mean that kind of enthralment."

''A Clergyman" 185

And here some poor wretch (whose name the disciple
will not remember) inquires: *'Are not Mrs. Glyn's
novels addressed to the passions?" and is in due form
annihilated. Can it be that a time will come when
readers of this passage in our pundit's Life will take
more interest in the poor nameless wretch than in all
the bearers of those great names put together, being
no more able or anxious to discriminate between (say)
Mrs. Ward and Mr. Sinclair than we are to set
Ogden above Sherlock, or Sherlock above Ogden?
It seems impossible. But we must remember that
things are not always what they seem.

Every man illustrious in his day, however much he

may be gratified by his fame, looks with an eager eye

to posterity for a continuance of past favors, and

would even live the remainder of his life in obscurity

if by so doing he could insure that future generations

would preserve a correct attitude towards him forever.

This is very natural and human, but, like so many very

natural and human things, very silly. Tillotson and

the rest need not, after all, be pitied for our neglect

of them. They either know nothing about it, or are

above such terrene trifles. Let us keep our pity for

the seething mass of divines who were not elegantly

verbose, and had no fun or glory while they lasted.

And let us keep a specially large portion for one whose

lot was so much worse than merely undistinguished.

l86 Max Beerbohm

If that nameless curate had not been at the Thrales'
that day, or, being there, had kept the silence that so
well became him, his Hfe would have been drab enough,
in all conscience. But at any rate an unpromising
career would not have been nipped in the bud. And
that is what in fact happened, I'm sure of it. A robust
man might have rallied under the blow. Not so our
friend. Those who knew him in infancy had not ex-
pected that he would be reared. Better for him had
they been right. It is well to grow up and be or-
dained, but not if you are delicate and very sensitive,
and shall happen to annoy the greatest, the most
stentorian and roughest of contemporary personages.
'*A Clergyman" never held up his head or smiled
again after the brief encounter recorded for us by
Boswell. He sank into a rapid decline. Before the
next blossoming of Thrale Hall's almond trees he was
no more. I like to think that he died forgiving Dr.
Johnson.

SAMUEL BUTLER: DIOGENES OF THE
VICTORIANS

By Stuart P. Sherman

Professor Sherman's cold compress, applied to the Butler cult,
caused much suffering in some regions, where it was said to be
more than a cooling bandage— in fact, a wet blanket. In the
general rough-and-tumble among critical standards during recent
years Mr. Sherman is one of those who have dealt some swing-
ing blows in favor of the Victorians and the literary Old Guard
—which was often square but rarely hollow.

Stuart Pratt Sherman, born in Iowa in 1881, graduated from
Williams in 1903, has been since 191 1 professor of Enghsh
at the University of Illinois. His own account of his adven-
tures, written without intended publication, is worth considera-
tion. He says :

"My life hasn't been quite as dryly 'academic,' nor as simply
'middle-Western,' as the record indicates. For example : 1
lived in Los Angeles from my 5th to my 13th year, and
then went on a seven months' adventure in gold mining
in the Black Cafion of Arizona, where I had some experi-
ence with drouth in the desert, etc. That is not hterary.
"Recently, I've been thinking I might write a little pa-
per about some college friends at Wilhams. I was in
college with Harry James Smith (author of Mr^.5wm/>-
stead Lee), Max Eastman, and 'Go-to-Hell' Whittlesey.
As editor of the Williams Monthly I have accepted and
rejected manuscripts of both the two latter, and have
reminiscences of their literary youth. .

"Then I spent a summer in the Post and Nation in 1908,
which is a pleasant chapter to remember; another summer
teaching at Columbia; this past summer teaching at the
University of California. My favorite recreations are
climbing little mountains, chopping wood, and canoeing on

Lake Michigan. .^ a\^

"This summer I have been picking out a place to die

in— or rather looking over the sites offered in Calitornia.

I lean towards the high Sierras, up above the \ osemite

Valley. . , ^ xu «^^

"My ambition in life is to retire— perhaps at the age
of seventy— and write only for amusement. When i can
abandon the task of improving my contemporaries, i hope
to become a popular author."

l37

1 88 Stuart P. Sherman

Professor Sherman, you will note, is almost an exact con-
temporary of H. L. Mencken, with whom he has crossed swords
in more than one spirited encounter; and Sherman is likely to
give as good as he takes in such scuffles, or even rather better.
It is high time that his critical sagacity and powerful reasoning
were better known in the market-place.

Until I met the Butlerians I used to think that the
religious spirit in our times was very precious, there
was so little of it. I thought one should hold one's
breath before it as before the flicker of one's last
match on a cold night in the woods. "What if it
should go out?" I said; but my apprehension was
groundless. It can never go out. The religious spirit
is indestructible and constant in quantity like the sum
of universal energy in which matches and suns are alike
but momentary sparkles and phases. This great truth
I learned of the Butlerians: Though the forms and
objects of religious belief wax old as a garment and
are changed, faith, which is, after all, the precious
thing, endures forever. Destroy a man's faith in God
and he will worship humanity; destroy his faith in
humanity and he will worship science ; destroy his
faith in science and he will worship himself; destroy
his faith in himself and he will worship Samuel Butler.

What makes the Butlerian cult so impressive is, of
course, that Butler, poor dear, as the English say, was
the least worshipful of men. He was not even — till
his posthumous disciples made him so — a person of
any particular importance. One writing a private

Diogenes of the Victorians 189

memorandum of his death might have produced some-
thing like this: Samuel Butler was an unsociable,
burry, crotchety, obstinate old bachelor, a dilettante
in art and science, an unsuccessful author, a witty
cynic of inquisitive temper and, comprehensively speak-
ing, the unregarded Diogenes of the Victorians. Son
of a clergyman and grandson of a bishop, born in 1835,
educated at Cambridge, he began to prepare for ordina-
tion. But, as we are told, because of scruples regard-
ing infant baptism he abandoned the prospect of holy
orders and in 1859 sailed for New Zealand, where with
capital supplied by his father he engaged in sheep-
farming for five years. In 1864, returning to England
with £8,000, he established himself for life at Clifford's
Inn, London. He devoted some years to painting,
adored Handel and dabbled in music, made occasional
trips to Sicily and Italy, and wrote a dozen books,
which generally fell dead from the press, on religion,
literature, art and scientific theory. "Erewhon," how-
ever, a Utopian romance published in 1872, had by
1899 sold between three and four thousand copies.
Butler made few friends and apparently never mar-
ried. He died in 1902. His last words were : "Have
you brought the cheque book, Alfred?'' His body was
cremated and the ashes were buried in a garden by
his biographer and his man-servant, with nothing to
mark the spot.

190 Stuart P. Sherman

Butler's indifference to the disposal of his earthly
part betokens no contempt for fame. Denied contem-
porary renown, he had firmly set his heart on immor-
tality, and quietly, persistently, cannily provided for
it. If he could not go down to posterity by the suf-
frage of his countrymen, he would go down by the
shrewd use of his cheque book; he would buy his way
in. He bought the publication of most of the books
produced in his lifetime. He diligently prepared man-
uscripts for posthumous publication and accumulated
and arranged great masses of materials for a biog-
rapher. He insured an interest in his literary remains
by bequeathing them and all his copyrights to his liter-
ary executor, R. A. Streatfeild. He purchased an in-
terest in a biographer by persuading Henry Festing
Jones, a feckless lawyer of Butlerian proclivities, to
abandon the law and become his musical and literary
companion. In return for these services Mr. Jones
received between 1887 and 1900 an allowance of £200
a year, and at Butler's death a bequest of £500, the
musical copyrights and the manifest responsibility and
privilege of assisting Streatfeild with the propagation
of Butler's fame, together with their own, in the next
generation.

These good and faithful servants performed their
duties with exemplary zeal and astuteness. In 1903.
the year following the Master's death, Streatfeild pub-

Diogenes of the Victorians 191

lished "The Way of All Flesh," a book packed with
satirical wit, the first since "Erewhon" which was cap-
able of walking off on its own legs and exciting gen-
eral curiosity about its author— curiosity intensified by
the announcement that the novel had been written be-
tween 1872 and 1884. In the wake of this sensation
there began the systematic annual relaunching of old
works, with fresh introductions and memoirs and a
piecemeal feeding out of other literary remains, cul-
minating in 19 1 7 with the publication of *'The Note-
Books," a skilful collection and condensation of the
whole of Butler's intellectual life. Meanwhile, in 1908,
the Erewhon dinner had been instituted. In spite of
mild deprecation, this feast, with its two toasts to his
Majesty and to the memory of Samuel Butler, assumed
from the outset the aspect of a solemn sacrament of
believers. Among these was conspicuous on the sec-
ond occasion Mr. George Bernard Shaw, not quite
certain, perhaps, whether he had come to give or to
receive honor, whether he was himself to be regarded
as the beloved disciple or rather as the one for whom
Butler, preaching in the Victorian wilderness, had
prepared the way with "free and future-piercing sug-
gestions."

By 1914 Streatfeild was able to declare that no frag-
ment of Butler's was too insignificant to publish. In
19 1 5 and 1 916 appeared extensive critical studies by

192 Stuart P. Sherman

Gilbert Cannan and John F. Harris. In 19 19 at last
arrives Henry Festing Jones with the authoritative
memoir in two enormous volumes with portraits, docu-
ments, sumptuous index, elaborate bibliography and a
pious accounting to the public for the original manu-
scripts, which have been deposited like sacred relics at
St. John's College, the Bodleian, the British Museum,
the Library of Congress and at various shrines in Italy
and Sicily. Here are materials for a fresh considera-
tion of the man in relation to his work.

The unconverted will say that such a monument to
such a man is absurdly disproportionate. But Butler
is now more than a man. He is a spiritual ancestor,
leader of a movement, moulder of young minds,
founder of a faith. His monument is designed not
merely to preserve his memory but to mark as well the
present importance of the Butlerian sect. The memoir
appears to have been written primarily for them. The
faithful will no doubt find it delicious; and I, though
an outsider, got through it without fatigue and with a
kind of perverse pleasure in its perversity.

It is very instructive, but it by no means simplifies
its puzzling and complex subject. Mr. Jones is not
of the biographers who look into the heart of a man,
reduce him to a formula and recreate him in accord-
ance with it. He works from the outside, inward, and
gradually achieves life and reality by an immense ac-

Diogenes of the Victorians 193

cumulation of objective detail, without ever plucking
out, or even plucking at, the heart of the mystery.
What was the man's ^'master passion" and his master
faculty? Butler himself did not know; consequently
he could not always distinguish his wisdom from his
folly. He was an ironist entangled in his own net and
an egotist bitten with self-distrust, concealing his
wounds in self-assertion and his hesitancies in an ex-
ternal aggressiveness. Mr. Jones pierces the shell here
and there, but never removes it. Considering his op-
portunities, he is sparing in composed studies of his
subject based on his own direct observation ; and, with
all his ingenuousness and his shocking but illuminating
indiscretions, he is frequently silent as a tomb where
he must certainly possess information for which every
reader will inquire, particularly those readers who do
not, like the Butlerians, accept Samuel Butler as the
happy reincarnation of moderation, common sense and
fearless honesty.

The whole case of the Georgians against the Vic-
torians might be fought out over his life and works;
and indeed there has already been many a skirmish in
that quarter. For, of course, neither Streatfeild nor
Mr. Jones is ultimately responsible for his revival.
Ultimately Butler's vogue is due to the fact that he is a
friend of the Georgian revolution against idealism in
the very citadel of the enemy; the extraordinary ac

194 Stuart P. Sherman

claim with which he is now received is his revjard
for having long ago prepai'ed to betray the Victorians
into the hands of a ruthless posterity. He was a traitor
to his own times, and therefore it follows that he was
a man profoundly disillusioned. The question which
we may all reasonably raise with regard to a traitor
whom we have received within our lines is whether he
will make us a good citizen. We should like to know
pretty thoroughly how he fell out with his countrymen
— whether through defects in his own temper and
character or through a clear-eyed and righteous indig-
nation with the incorrigible viciousness of their man-
ners and institutions. We should like to know what
vision of reformation succeeded his disillusion. Hith-
erto the Georgians have been more eloquent in their
disillusions than in their visions, and have inclined
to welcome Butler as a dissolving agent without much
inspecting his solution.

The Butlerians admire Butler for his withering at-
tack on family life, notably in 'The Way of All Flesh" ;
and many a studious literary man with a talkative wife
and eight romping children would, of course, admit
an occasional flash of romantic envy for Butler's bach-
elor apartments. Mr. Jones tells us that Theobald and
Christina Pontifex, whose nakedness Butler uncovers^
were drawn without exaggeration from his own father
and mother. His work on them is a masterpiece of

Diogenes of the Victorians 195

pitiless satire. Butler appears to have hated his father,
despised his mother and loathed his sisters in all truth
and sincerity. He nursed his vindictive and contemptu-
ous feelings towards them all through his life; he
studied these feelings, made notes on them, jested out
of them, Hved in them, reduced them to a philosophy
of domestic antipathy.

He was far more learned than any other English
author in the psychology of impiety. When he heard
some one say, ''Two are better than one," he ex-
claimed, **Yes, but the man who said that did not know
my sisters." When he was forty-eight years old he
wrote to a friend that his father was in poor health
and not likely to recover ; "but may hang on for months
or go off with the N. E. winds which we are sure to
have later on." In the same letter he writes that he
is going to strike out forty weak pages in "Erewhon"
and stick in forty stronger ones on the *'trial of a
middle-aged man 'for not having lost his father at a
suitable age.' " His father's one unpardonable offense
was not dying early and so enlarging his son's income.
If this had been a jest, it would have been a little
coarse for a deathbed. But Mr. Jones, who appears
to think it very amusing, proves clearly enough that
it was not a jest, but an obsession, and a horrid obses-
sion it was. Now a man who attacks the family be-
cause his father does not die as promptly as could be

196 Stuart P. Sherman

desired is not likely to propose a happy substitute;
his mood is not reconstructive, funny though it may be
in two old boys of fifty, like Butler and Jones, living
along like spoiled children on allowances, Butler from
his father, Jones from his mother.

The Butlerians admire Butler for his brilliant at-
tack on "romantic" relations between the sexes. Be-
fore the advent of Shaw he poured poison on the roots
of that imaginative love in which all normal men and
maidens walk at least once in a lifetime as in a rosy
cloud shot through with golden lights.

His portraits show a man of vigorous physique, cap-
able of passion, a face distinctly virile, rather harshly
bearded, with broad masculine eyebrows. Was he ever
in love? If not, why was he not? Elementary ques-
tions which his biographer after a thousand pages
leaves unanswered. Mr. Jones asserts that both Over-
ton and Ernest in 'The Way of All Flesh" are in the
main accurately autobiographical, and he furnishes
much evidence for the point. He remarks a divergence
in this fact, that Butler, unlike his hero, was never in
prison. Did Butler, like his hero, have children and
farm them out? The point is of some interest in the
case of a man who is helping us to destroy the conven-
tional family.

Mr. Jones leaves quite in the dark his relations with
such women as the late Queen Victoria would not

Diogenes of the Victorians 197

have approved, relations which J. B. Yeats has, how-
ever, pubHcly discussed. Mr. Jones is ordinarily cyn-
ical enough, candid enough, as we shall see. He takes
pains to tell us that his own grandfather was never
married. He does not hesitate to acknowledge abun-
dance of moral ugliness in his subject. Why this access
of Victorian reticence at a point where plain-speaking
is the order of the day and the special pride of con-
temporary Erewhonians? Why did a young man of
Butler's tastes leave the church and go into exile in
New Zealand for five years? Could a more resolute
biographer perhaps find a more "realistic" explana-
tion than difficulties over infant baptism? Mr. Shaw
told his publisher that Butler was "a shy old bird."
In some respects he was also a sly old bird.

Among the "future-piercing suggestions" extolled
by Mr. Shaw we may be sure that the author of "Man
and Superman" was pleased to acknowledge Butler's
prediscovery that woman is the pursuer. This idea
we may now trace quite definitely to his relations with
Miss Savage, a witty, sensible, presumably virtuous
woman of about his own age, living in a club in Lon-
don, who urged hm to write fiction, read all his manu-
scripts, knitted him socks, reviewed his books in
women's magazines and corresponded with him for
years till she died, without his knowledge, in hospital
from cancer. Her letters are Mr. Jones' mainstay in

198 Stuart P. Sherman

his first volume and she is, except Butler himself, alto-i
gether his most interesting personality. Mr. Jones
says that being unable to find any one who could au-
thorize him to use her letters, he publishes them on
his own responsibility. But he adds, "I cannot imag-
ine that any relation of hers who may read her let-
ters will experience any feelings other than pride and
delight." This lady, he tells us, was the original of
Alethea Pontifex. But he marks a difference. Alethea
tvas handsome. Miss Savage, he says, was short, fat,
had hip disease, and "that kind of dowdiness which I
used to associate with ladies who had been at school
with my mother." Butler became persuaded that Miss
Savage loved him; this bored him; and the correspond-
ence would lapse till he felt the need of her cheery
friendship again. On one occasion she wrote to him,
"I wish that you did not know wrong from right.''
Mr. Jones believes that she was alluding to his scrupu-
lousness in matters of business. Butler himself con-
strued the words as an overture to which he was in-
disposed to respond. The debate on this point and
the pretty uncertainty in which it is left can surely
arouse in Miss Savage's relations no other feelings
than "pride and delight."

This brings us to the Butlerian substitute for the
chivalry which used to be practised by those who bore
what the Victorians called "the grand old name of

Diogenes of the Victorians 199

gentleman." In his later years, after the death of Miss
Savage, in periods of loneliness, depression and ill-
health, Butler made notes on his correspondence re-
proaching himself for his ill-treatment of her. "He
also," says his biographer, "tried to express his re-
morse" in two sonnets from which I extract some lines :

She was too kind, wooed too persistently,
Wrote moving letters to me day by day ;

Hard though I tried to love I tried in vain,
For she was plain and lame and fat and short,
Forty and overkind.

Tis said that if a woman woo, no man

Should leave her till she have prevailed; and, true,
A man will yield for pity if he can.
But if the flesh rebel what can he do?

I could not; hence I grieve my whole life long
The wrong I did in that I did no wrong.

In these Butlerian times one who should speak of
"good taste" would incur the risk of being called a prig.
Good taste is no longer "in." Yet even now, in the
face of these sonnets, may not one exclaim, Heaven
preserve us from the remorseful moments of a Butler-
ian Adonis of fifty!

200 Stuart P. Sherman

The descendants of eminent Victorians may well be
thankful that their fathers had no intimate relations
with Butler. There is a familiar story of Whistler,
that when some one praised his latest portrait as equal
to Velasquez, he snapped back, "Yes, but why lug in
Velasquez?" Butler, with similar aversion for rivals,
but without Whistler's extempore wit, slowly excogi-
tated his killing sallies and entered them in his note-
books or sent them in a letter to Miss Savage, preserv-
ing a copy for the delectation of the next age : ''I do
not see how I can well call Mr. Darwin the Pecksniff
of Science, though this is exactly what he is; but I
think I may call Lord Bacon the Pecksniff of his age
and then, a little later, say that Mr. Darwin is the
Bacon of the Victorian Era.'* To this he adds another
note reminding himself to call ^'Tennyson the Darwin
of Poetry, and Darwin the Tennyson of Science." I
can recall but one work of a contemporary mentioned
favorably in the biography; perhaps there are two.
The staple of his comment runs about as follows:
*'Middlemarch" is a "longwinded piece of studied
brag" ; of '7^^" Inglesant," "I seldom was more dis-
pleased with any book" ; of ''Aurora Leigh," *T dislike
it very much, but I liked it better than Mrs. Browning,
or Mr., either"; of Rossetti, "I dislike his face and his
manner and his work, and I hate his poetry and his
friends"; of George Meredith, *'No wonder if his wor'k

Diogenes of the Victorians 20 1

repels me that mine should repel him"; "all I remember
is that I disliked and distrusted Morley"; of Gladstone,
"Who was it said that he was *a good man in the very
worst sense of the words' ?" The homicidal spirit here
exhibited may be fairly related to his anxiety for the
death of his father.

It was on the whole characteristic of Victorian free-
thinkers to attack Christianity with reverence and dis-
crimination in an attempt to preserve its substance
while removing obstacles to the acceptance of its sub-
stance. Butler was Voltairean. When he did not at-
tack mischievously like a gamin, he attacked vindic-
tively like an Italian laborer whose sweetheart has
been false to him. I have seen it stated that he was a
broad churchman and a communicant; and Mr. Jones
produces a letter from a clergyman testifying to his
"saintliness." But this must be some of Mr. Jones's
fun. From Gibbon, read on the voyage to New Zea-
land, Butler imbibed, he says, in a letter of 1861, "a
calm and philosophic spirit of impartial and critical
investigation.'* In 1862 he writes: "For the present
I renounce Christianity altogether. You say people
must have something to believe in. I can only say
that I have not found my digestion impeded since I
left off believing in what does not appear to be sup*
ported by sufficient evidence." When in 1865 he
printed his "Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus

202 Stuart P. Sherman

Christ," the manner of his attack was impish; and so
was the gleeful exchange of notes between him and
Miss Savage over the way the orthodox swallowed the
bait. In his notebook he wrote: "Mead is the lowest
of the intoxicants, just as Church is the lowest of the
dissipations, and carraway seed the lowest of the condi-
ments." He went to church once in 1883 ^o please a
friend and was asked whether it had not bored him
as inconsistent with his principles. *'I said that, having
given up Christianity, I was not going to be hampered
by its principles. It was the substance of Christianity,
and not its accessories of external worship, that I had
objected to ... so I went to church out of pure
cussedness." Finally, in a note of 1889: 'There will
be no comfortable and safe development of our social
arrangements — I mean we shall not get infanticide,
and the permission of suicide, nor cheap and easy
divorce — till Jesus Christ's ghost has been laid; and
the best way to lay it is to be a moderate church-
man."

Robert Burns was a free-thinker, but he wrote the
"Cotter's Saturday Night" ; Renan was a free-thinker,
but he buried his God in purple ; Matthew Arnold was
a free-thinker, but he gave new life to the religious
poetry of the Bible; Henry Adams believed only in
mathematical physics, but he wrote of Mont St. Michel
and Chartres with chivalrous and almost Catholic

Diogenes of the Victorians 203

tenderness for the Virgin : for in all these diverse men
there was reverence for what men have adored as their
highest. There was respect for a tomb, even for the
tomb of a God. Butler, having transferred his faith
to the Bank of England, diverted himself like a street
Arab with a slingshot by peppering the church win-
dows. He established manners for the contemporary
Butlerian who, coming down to breakfast on Christmas
morning, exclaims with a pleased smile, *'Well, this is
the birthday of the hook-nosed Nazarene!"

Butler's moral note is rather attractive to young and
middle-aged persons: ''We have all sinned and come
short of the glory of making ourselves as comfortable
as we easily might have done." His ethics is founded
realistically on physiology and economics; for "good-
ness is naught unless it tends towards old age and
sufficiency of means." Pleasure, dressed like a quiet
man of the world, is the best teacher : "The devil, when
he dresses himself in angels' clothes, can only be de-
tected by experts of exceptional skill, and so often does
he adopt this disguise that it is hardly safe to be seen
talking to an angel at all, and prudent people will fol-
low after pleasure as a more homely but more respect-
able and on the whole more trustworthy guide." There
we have something of the tone of our genial Franklin;
but Butler is a Franklin without a single impulse of
Franklin's wide benevolence and practical beneficence,

204 Stuart P. Sherman

a Franklin shorn of the spirit of his greatness, namely,
his immensely intelligent social consciousness.

Having disposed of Christianity, orthodox and
otherwise, and having reduced the morality of "en-
lightened selfishness" to its lowest terms, Butler turned
in the same spirit to the destruction of orthodox Vic-
torian science. We are less concerned for the moment
with his substance than with his character and manner
as scientific controversialist. '*If I cannot," he wrote,
''and I know I cannot, get the literary and scientific
bigwigs to give me a shilling, I can, and I know I can,
heave bricks into the middle of them." Though such
professional training as he had was for the church and
for painting, he seems never to have doubted that his
mother wit was sufficient equipment, supplemented by
reading in the British Museum, for the overthrow of
men like Darwin, Wallace and Huxley, who from boy-
hood had given their lives to collecting, studying and
experimenting with scientific data. "I am quite ready
to admit," he records, ''that I am in a conspiracy of
one against men of science in general." Having felt
himself covertly slighted in a book for which Darwin
was responsible, he vindictively assailed, not merely
the work, but also the character of Darwin and his
friends, who, naturally inferring that he was an un-
scrupulous "bounder" seeking notoriety, generally
ignored him.

Diogenes of the Victorians 205

His first "contribution" to evolutionary theory had
been a humorous skit, written in New Zealand, on the
evolution of machines, suggested by ''The Origin of
Species," and later included in "Erewhon." To sup-
port this whimsy he found it useful to revive the aban-
doned "argument from design"; and mother wit, still
working whimsically, leaped to the conception that the
organs of our bodies are machines. Thereupon he
commenced serious scientific speculator, and produced
"Life and Habit," 1878; "Evolution Old and New,"
1879; "Unconscious Memory," 1880; and "Luck or
Cunning," 1886. The germ of all his speculations,
contained in his first volume, is the notion of "the one-
ness of personality existing between parents and off-
spring up to the time that the offspring leaves the
parent's body"; thence develops his theory that the
offspring "unconsciously" remembers what happened
to the parents; and thence his theory that a vitalistic
purposeful cunning, as opposed to the Darwinian
chance, is the significant factor in evolution. His
theory has something in common with current philo-
sophical speculation, and it is in part, as I understand,
a kind of adumbration, a shrewd guess, at the present
attitude of cytologists. It has thus entitled Butler to
half a dozen footnotes in a centenary volume on Dar-
win; but it hardly justifies his transference of Darwin's
laurels to Buffon, Lamarck, Erasmus Darwin and him-

206 Stuart P. Sherman

self; nor does it justify his reiterated contention that
Darwin was a plagiarist, a fraud, a Pecksniff and a
liar. He swelled the ephemeral body of scientific
speculation; but his contribution to the verified body of
science w^as negligible, and the injuries that he in-
flicted upon the scientific spirit were considerable.

For their symptomatic value, we must glance at
Butler's sallies into some other fields. He held as an
educational principle that it is hardly worth while to
study any subject till one is ready to use it. When in
his fifties he wished to write music, he took up for the
first time the study of counterpoint. Mr. Garnett
having inquired what subject Butler and Jones would
take up when they had finished "Narcissus," Butler said
that they "might write an oratorio on some sacred
subject"; and when Garnett asked whether they had
anything in particular in mind, he replied that they
were thinking of "The Woman Taken in Adultery."
In the same decade he cheerfully applied for the Slade
professorship of art at Cambridge; and he took credit
for the rediscovery of a lost school of sculpture.

At the age of fifty-five he brushed up his Greek,
which he "had not wholly forgotten," and read the
"Odyssey" for the purposes of his oratorio, "Ulysses."
When he got to Circe it suddenly flashed upon him
that he was reading the work of a young woman!
Thereupon he produced his book, "The Authoress of

Diogenes of the Victorians 207

the Odyssey," with portrait of the authoress, Nausicaa,
identification of her birthplace in Sicily, which pleased
the Sicilians, and an account of the way in which she
wrote her poem. It was the most startling literary dis-
covery since Delia Bacon burst into the silent sea on
which Colonel Fabyan of the biliteral cypher is the
latest navigator. That the classical scholars laughed
at or ignored him did not shake his belief that the work
was as important as anything he had done. "Perhaps
it was," he would have remarked, if any one else had
written it. "I am a prose man," he wrote to Robert
Bridges, "and, except Homer and Shakespeare" — he
should have added Nausicaa — "I have read absolutely
nothing of English poetry and very little of English
prose." His inacquaintance with English poetry, how-
ever, did not embarrass him, when, two years after
bringing out his Sicilian authoress, he cleared up the
mysteries of Shakespeare's sonnets. Nor did it pre-
vent his dismissing the skeptical Dr. Furnivall, after a
discussion at an A. B. C. shop, as a poor old incompe-
tent. "Nothing," said Alethea Pontifex, speaking for
her creator, "is well done nor worth doing unless, take
it all round, it has come pretty easily." The poor old
doctor, like the Greek scholars and the professional
men of science, had blunted his wits by too much
research.
Butler maintained that every man's work is a por-

2o8 Stuart P. Sherman

trait of himself, and in his own case the features stand
out ruggedly enough. Why should any one see in this
infatuated pursuer of paradox a reincarnation of the
pagan wisdom ? In his small personal affairs he shows
a certain old-maidish tidiness and the prudence of an
experienced old bachelor, who manages his little pleas-
ures without scandal. But in his intellectual life what
vestige do w^e find of the Greek or even of the Roman
sobriety, poise and decorum? In one respect Butler
was conservative : he respected the established political
and economic order. But he respected it only because
it enabled him, without bestirring himself about his
bread and butter, to sit quietly in his rooms at Clifford's
Inn and invent attacks on ever}^ other form of ortho-
doxy. With a desire to be conspicuous only surpassed
by his desire to be original he worked out the central
Butlerian principle ; videlicet : The fact that all the best
qualified judges agree that a thing is true and valuable
establishes an overwhelming presumption that it is
valueless and false. With his feet firmly planted on
this grand radical maxim he employed his lively wit
with lawyer-like ingenuity to make out a case against
family life, of which he was incapable; against imagi-
native love, of which he was ignorant ; against chivalry,
otherwise the conventions of gentlemen, which he had
but imperfectly learned; against Victorian men of let-
ters, whom, by his own account, he had never read;

Diogenes of the Victorians 209

against altruistic morality and the substance of Chris-
tianity, which were repugnant to his selfishness and
other vices; against Victorian men of science, whose
researches he had never imitated; and against Eliza-
bethan and classical scholarship, which he took up in
an odd moment as one plays a game of solitaire before
going to bed. To his disciples he could not bequeath
his cleverness; but he left them his recipe for origi-
nality, his manners and his assurance, which has been
gathering compound interest ever since. In the origi-
nal manuscript of "Alps and Sanctuaries" he consigned
"Raffaele, along with Socrates, Virgil [the last two
displaced later by Plato and Dante], Marcus Aurelius
Antoninus, Goethe, Beethoven, and another, to limbo
as the Seven Humbugs of Christiandom." Who was
the unnamed seventh ?

BED-BOOKS AND NIGHT-LIGHTS
By H. M. ToMLiNsoN

I shall not forget with what a thrill of delie:ht I came upon
H. M. Tomlinson's Old Junk, the volume of essays from which
this is borrowed. One feels, in stumbling upon such a book, much
as some happy and astounded readers must have felt in 1878
when An Inland Voyage came out. It makes one wonder, sub-
mitting one's self to the moving music and magic of that prose,
so simple and yet so subtle in its flavor, whether poetn,- is not,
after all, an inferior and more mechanic form. "The cool
element of_ prose," that perfect phrase of Milton's, comes back
to mind. How direct and satisfying a passage to the mind Mr.
Tomlinson's paragraphs have. How they build and cumulate,
how the sentences shift, turn and move in delicate loops and
ridges under the blowing wind of thought, like the sand of the
dunes that he describes in one essay. And through it all, as
intangible but as real and beautifying as moonlight, there is the
pervading brightness of a particular way of looking at the world,
something for which we have no catchword, the illumination
of a spirit at once humorous, melancholy, shrewd, lovely and
humane. Somehow, when one is caught in the web of that ex-
quisite, considered prose, the awkward symbols of speech seem
transparent; we come close to a man's mind.

In Mr. Tomlinson's three books — The Sea and the Jungle
(1912), Old Junk (1920) and London River (1921) is revealed
one of the most sincere and perfect workmen in contemporary-
prose.

H. M. Tomlinson was born in 1873 ; among his early memories
he records : "I was an office boy and a clerk among London's
ships, in the last days of the clippers. And I am forced to recall
some of the things — such as bookkeeping in a jam factory and
stoking on a tramp steamer." He joined the staff of the London
Morning Leader in 1904 ; which was later merged with the Daily
News, and to this journal he was attached for several years.
During the War he was a correspondent in France; at the
danger of incurring his anger (should he see this) I quote Mr.
S. K. Ratcliffe on this phase of his work: — "One who was the
friend of all, a sweet and fine spirit moving untouched amid the
ruin and terror, expressing itself everywhere with perfect sim-
plicity, and at times with a shattering candor."

In 191 7 he became associate editor of the London Nation,
where, if you are interested, you may find his initials almosi
weekly.

210

Bed-Books and Night-Lights 21 1

The rain flashed across the midnight window with
a myriad feet. There was a groan in outer darkness,
the voice of all nameless dreads. The nervous candle-
flame shuddered by my bedside. The groaning rose
to a shriek, and the Httle flame jumped in a panic, and
nearly left its white column. Out of the corners of
the room swarmed the released shadows. Black spec-
ters danced in ecstasy over my bed. I love fresh air,
but I cannot allow it to slay the shining and delicate
body of my little friend the candle-flame, the comrade
who ventures with me into the solitudes beyond mid-
night. I shut the window.

They talk of the candle-power of an electric bulb.
What do they mean ? It cannot have the faintest glim-
mer of the real power of my candle. It would be as
right to express, in the same inverted and foolish com-
parison, the worth of ''those delicate sisters, the
Pleiades." That pinch of star dust, the Pleiades, ex-
quisitely remote in deepest night, in the profound
where light all but fails, has not the power of a sul-
phur match ; yet, still apprehensive to the mind though
tremulous on the limit of vision, and sometimes even
vanishing, it brings into distinction those distant and
diflicult hints — hidden far behind all our verified
thoughts — which we rarely properly view. I should
like to know of any great arc-lamp which could do
that. So the star-like candle for me. No other light

212 H. M. Tomlinson

follows so intimately an author's most ghostly sug-
gestion. We sit, the candle and I, in the midst of the
shades we are conquering, and sometimes look up from
the lucent page to contemplate the dark hosts of the
enemy with a smile before they overwhelm us; as they
will, of course. Like me, the candle is mortal ; it will
burn out.

As the bed-book itself should be a sort of night-light,
to assist its illumination, coarse lamps are useless.
They would douse the book. The light for such a
book must accord with it. It must be, like the book, a
limited, personal, mellow, and companionable glow;
the solitary taper beside the only worshiper in a sanc-
tuary. That is why nothing can compare with the
intimacy of candle-light for a bed-book. It is a living
heart, bright and warm in central night, burning for
us alone, holding the gaunt and towering shadows at
bay. There the monstrous specters stand in our mid-
night room, the advance guard of the darkness of
the world, held off by our valiant little glim, but ready
to flood instantly and founder us in original gloom.

The wind moans without; ancient evils are at large
and wandering in torment. The rain shrieks across
the window. For a moment, for just a moment, the
sentinel candle is shaken, and burns blue with terror.
The shadows leap out instantly. The little flame
recovers, and merely looks at its foe the darkness, and

Bed-Books and Night-Lights 213

back to its own place goes the old enemy of light and
man. The candle for me, tiny, mortal, warm, and
brave, a golden lily on a silver stem !

"Almost any book does for a bed-book," a woman
once said to me. I nearly replied in a hurry that
almost any woman would do for a wife; but that is
not the way to bring people to conviction of sin. Her
idea was that the bed-book is soporific, and for that
reason she even advocated the reading of political
speeches. That would be a dissolute act. Certainly
you would go to sleep; but in what a frame of mind!
You would enter into sleep with your eyes shut. It
would be like dying, not only unshriven, but in the
act of guilt.

What book shall it shine upon ? Think of Plato, or
Dante, or Tolstoy, or a Blue Book for such an occa-
sion! I cannot. They will not do — they are no good
to me. I am not writing about you. I know those
men I have named are transcendent, the greater lights.
But I am bound to confess at times they bore me.
Though their feet are clay and on earth, just as ours,
their stellar brows are sometimes dim in remote clouds.
For my part, they are too big for bed-fellows. I
cannot see myself, carrying my feeble and restricted
glim, following (in pajamas) the statuesque figure of
the Florentine where it stalks, aloof in its garb of
austere pity, the sonorous deeps of Hades. Hades!

214 ^' ^' Tomlinson

Not for me; not after midnight! Let those go who
like it.

As for the Russian, vast and disquieting, I refuse to
leave all, including the blankets and the pillow, to fol-
low him into the gelid tranquillity of the upper air,
where even the colors are prismatic spicules of ice, to
brood upon the erratic orbit of the poor mud-ball below
called earth. I know it is my world also; but I can-
not help that. It is too late, after a busy day, and at
that hour, to begin overtime on fashioning a new and
better planet out of cosmic dust. By breakfast-time,
nothing useful would have been accomplished. We
should all be where we were the night before. The
job is far too long, once the pillow is nicely set.

For the truth is, there are times when we are too
weary to remain attentive and thankful under the im-
proving eye, kindly but severe, of the seers. There
are times when we do not wish to be any better than
we are. We do not wish to be elevated and improved.
At midnight, away with such books! As for the
literary pundits, the high priests of the Temple of Let-
ters, it is interesting and helpful occasionally for an
acolyte to swinge them a good hard one with an in-
cense-burner, and cut and run, for a change, to some-
thing outside the rubrics. Midnight is the time when
one can recall, with ribald delight, the names of all the
Great Works which every gentleman ought to have

Bed-Books and Night-Lights 215

read, but which some of us have not. For there is
almost as much clotted nonsense written about litera-
ture as there is about theology.

There are few books which go with midnight, soli-
tude, and a candle. It is much easier to say what
does not please us then than what is exactly right.
The book must be, anyhow, something benedictory by
a sinning fellow-man. Cleverness would be repellent
at such an hour. Cleverness, anyhow, is the level
of mediocrity to-day; we are all too infernally clever.
The first witty and perverse paradox blows out the
candle. Only the sick in mind crave cleverness, as a
morbid body turns to drink. The late candle throws
its beams a great distance; and its rays make trans-
parent much that seemed massy and important. The
mind at rest beside that light, when the house is asleep,
and the consequential affairs of the urgent world have
diminished to their right proportions because we see
them distantly from another and a more tranquil place
in the heavens where duty, honor, witty arguments,
controversial logic on great questions, appear such as
will leave hardly a trace of fossil in the indurated mud
which presently will cover them — the mind then cer-
tainly smiles at cleverness.

For though at that hour the body may be dog-tired,
the mind is white and lucid, like that of a man from
whom a fever has abated. It is bare of illusions. It

2i6 H. M. Tomlinson

has a sharp focus, small and starlike, as a clear and
lonely flame left burning by the altar of a shrine from
which all have gone but one. A book which ap-
proaches that light in the privacy of that place must
come, as it were, with honest and open pages.

I like Heine then, though. His mockery of the grave
and great, in those sentences which are as brave as
pennants in a breeze, is comfortable and sedative.
One's own secret and awkward convictions, never ex-
pressed because not lawful and because it is hard to get
words to bear them lightly, seem then to be heard aloud
in the mild, easy, and confident diction of an immortal
whose voice has the blitheness of one who has watched,
amused and irreverent, the high gods in eager and
secret debate on the best way to keep the gilt and
trappings on the body of the evil they have created.

That first-rate explorer, Gulliver, is also fine in the
light of the intimate candle. Have you read lately
again his Voyage to the Houyhnhnms? Try it alone
again in quiet. Swift knew all about our contemporary
troubles. He has got it all down. Why was he called
a misanthrope? Reading that last voyage of Gulliver
in the select intimacy of midnight I am forced to
wonder, not at Swift's hatred of mankind, not at his
satire of his fellows, not at the strange and terrible
nature of this genius who thought that much of us, but
how it is that after such a wise and sorrowful reveal-

Bed-Books and Night-Lights zij

ing of the things we insist on doing, and our reasons
for doing them, and what happens after we have done
them, men do not change. It does seem impossible
that society could remain unaltered, after the surprise
its appearance should have caused it as it saw its face
in that ruthless mirror. We point instead to the fact
that Swift lost his mind in the end. Well, that is not
a matter for surprise.

Such books, and France's "Isle of Penguins," are not
disturbing as bed-books. They resolve one's agitated
and outraged soul, relieving it with some free expres-
sion for the accusing and questioning thoughts en-
gendered by the day's affairs. But they do not rest
immediately to hand in the book-shelf by the bed.
They depend on the kind of day one has had. Sterne is
closer. One would rather be transported as far as
possible from all the disturbances of earth's envelope
of clouds, and 'Tristram Shandy" is sure to be found
in the sun.

But best of all books for midnight are travel books.
Once I was lost every night for months with Doughty
in the "Arabia Deserta." He is a craggy author. A long
course of the ordinary facile stuff, such as one gets in
the Press every day, thinking it is English, sends one
thoughtless and headlong among the bitter herbs and
stark boulders of Doughty's burning and spacious ex-
panse; only to get bewildered, and the shins broken,

21 8 H, M. Tomlinson

and a great fatigue at first, in a strange land of fierce
sun, hunger, glittering spar, ancient plutonic rock, and
very Adam himself. But once you are acclimatized,
and know the language — it takes time — there is no
more London after dark, till, a wanderer returned from
a forgotten land, you emerge from the interior of
Arabia on the Red Sea coast again, feeling as though
you had lost touch with the world you used to know.
And if that doesn't mean good writing I know of no
other test.

Because once there was a father whose habit it was
to read with his boys nightly some chapters of the
Bible — and cordially they hated that habit of his — I
have that Book too; though I fear I have it for no
reason that he, the rigid old faithful, would be pleased
to hear about. He thought of the future when he
read the Bible; I read it for the past. The familiar
names, the familiar rhythm of its words, its wonder-
ful well-remembered stories of things long past — like
that of Esther, one of the best in English — the elo-
quent anger of the prophets for the people then who
looked as though they were alive, but were really dead
at heart, all is solace and home to me. And now I
think of it, it is our home and solace that we want in
a bed-book.

THE PRECEPT OF PEACE
By Louise Imogen Guiney

Louise Imogen Guiney (1861-1920), one of the rarest poets
and most delicately poised essayists this country has reared, has
been hitherto scantily appreciated by the omnipotent General
Reader. Her dainty spoor is perhaps too lightly trodden upon
earth to be followed by the throng. And yet one has faith in
the imperishability of such a star-dust track. This lovely and
profound "Precept of Peace" is peculiarly characteristic of her,
and reminds one of the humorous tranquillity with which she
faced the complete failure (financially speaking) of almost all her
books. There was a certain sadness in learning, when the news
of her death came, that many of our present-day critical San-
hedrim had never even become aware of her name.

There is no space, in this brief note, to do justice to her. The
student will refer to the newly published memoir by her friend,
AHce Brown.

She was born in Boston in 1861, daughter of General Patrick
Guiney who fought in the Civil War. From 1894-97 she was
postmistress in Auburndale, Mass. Her later years were spent
in England, mostly at Oxford : the Bodleian Library was a candle
and she the ecstatic moth.

A CERTAIN sort of voluntary abstraction is the oldest
and choicest of social attitudes. In France, where all
esthetic discoveries are made, it was crowned long
ago: la sainte indifference is, or may be, a cult, and
le saint indifferent an articled practitioner. For the
Gallic mind, brought up at the knee of a consistent
paradox, has found that not to appear concerned about
a desired good is the only method to possess it; full
happiness is given, in other words, to the very man
who will never sue for it. This is a secret neat as that

219

220 Louise Imogen Guiney

of the Sphinx : to "go softly" among events, yet domi-
neer them. Without fear: not because we are brave,
but because we are exempt; we bear so charmed a life
that not even Baldur's mistletoe can touch us to harm
us. Without solicitude : for the essential thing is
trained, falcon-like, to light from above upon our
wrists, and it has become with us an automatic motion
to open the hand, and drop what appertains to us no
longer. Be it renown or a new hat, the shorter stick
of celery, or

"The friends to whom we had no natural right.
The homes that were not destined to be ours,"

it is all one : let it fall away ! since only so, by deple-
tions, can we buy serenity and a blithe mien. It is
diverting to study, at the feet of Antisthenes and of
Socrates his master, how many indispensables man can
live without; or how many he can gather together,
make over into luxuries, and so abrogate them.
Thoreau somewhere expresses himself as full of divine
pity for the "mover," who on May-Day clouds city
streets with his melancholy household caravans : fatal
impedimenta for an immortal. No : furniture is clearly
a superstition. "I have little, I want nothing; all my
treasure is in Minerva's tower." Not that the novice
may not accumulate. Rather, let him collect beetles

The Precept of Peace 221

and Venetian interrogation-marks ; if so be that he may
distinguish what is truly extrinsic to him, and bestow
these toys, eventually, on the children of Satan who
clamor at the monastery gate. Of all his store, uncon-
sciously increased, he can always part with sixteen-
seventeenths, by way of concession to his individuality,
and think the subtraction so much concealing marble
chipped from the heroic figure of himself. He would
be a donor from the beginning; before he can be
seen to own, he will disencumber, and divide. Strange
and fearful is his discovery, amid the bric-a-brac of
the world, that this knowledge, or this material benefit,
is for him alone. He would fain beg off from the
acquisition, and shake the touch of the tangible from
his imperious wings. It is not enough to cease to
strive for personal favor; your true indifferent is
Early Franciscan : caring not to have, he fears to hold.
Things useful need never become to him things desir-
able. Towards all commonly-accounted sinecures, he
bears the coldest front in Nature, like a magician walk-
ing a maze, and scornful of its flower-bordered de-
tentions. "I enjoy life," says Seneca, "because I am
ready to leave it." Meanwhile, they who act with too
jealous respect for their morrow of civilized comfort,
reap only indigestion, and crow's-foot traceries for
their deluded eye-corners.

Now nothing is farther from le saint indifferent than

222 Louise Imogen Guiney

cheap indifferentism, so-called : the sickness of sopho-
mores. His business is to hide, not to display, his lack
of interest in fripperies. It is not he who looks languid,
and twiddles his thumbs for sick misplacedness, like
Achilles among girls. On the contrary, he is a smiling
industrious elf, monstrous attentive to the canons of
polite society. In relation to others, he shows what
passes for animation and enthusiasm; for at all times
his character is founded on control of these qualities,
not on the absence of them. It flatters his sense of
superiority that he may thus pull wool about the ears
of joint and several. He has so strong a will that it
can be crossed and counter-crossed, as by himself, so
by a dozen outsiders, without a break in his apparent
phlegm. He has gone through volition, and come out
at the other side of it ; everything with him is a specific
act : he has no habits. Le saint indifferent is a dramatic
wight : he loves to refuse your proffered six per cent,
when, by a little haggling, he may obtain three-and-a-
half. For so he gets away with his own mental proc-
esses virgin : it is inconceivable to you that, being sane,
he should so comport himself. Amiable, perhaps, only
by painful propulsions and sore vigilance, let him ap-
pear the mere inheritor of easy good-nature. Unselfish
out of sheer pride, and ever eager to claim the slippery
side of the pavement, or the end cut of the roast (on
the secret ground, be it understood, that he is not as

The Precept of Peace 223

Capuan men, who wince at trifles), let him have his
ironic reward in passing for one whose physical con-
noisseurship is yet in the raw. That sympathy which
his rule forbids his devoting to the usual objects, he
expends, with some bravado, upon their opposites; for
he would fain seem a decent partizan of some sort,
not what he is, a bivalve inteUigence, Tros Tyriusque.
He is known here and there, for instance, as valorous
in talk; yet he is by nature a solitary, and, for the
most part, somewhat less communicative than

"The wind that sings to himself as he makes stride,
Lonely and terrible, on the Andean height."

Imagining nothing idler than words in the face of
grave events, he condoles and congratulates with the
genteelest air in the world. In short, while there is
anything expected of him, while there are spectators
to be fooled, the stratagems of the fellow prove inex-
haustible. It is only when he is quite alone that he
drops his jaw, and stretches his legs; then heighol
arises like a smoke, and envelopes him becomingly, the
beautiful native well-bred torpidity of the gods, of
poetic boredom, of ''the Oxford manner."

''How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable!" sighed
Hamlet of this mortal outlook. As it came from him
in the beginning, that plaint, in its sincerity, can come

224 Louise Imogen Guiney

only from the man of culture, who feels about him
vast mental spaces and depths, and to whom the face
of creation is but comparative and symbolic. Nor will
he breathe it in the common ear, where it may woo
misapprehensions, and breed ignorant rebellion. The
unlettered must ever love or hate what is nearest him,
and, for lack of perspective, think his own fist the size
of the sun. The social prizes, which, with mellowed
observers, rank as twelfth or thirteenth in order of
desirability, such as wealth and a foothold in affairs,
seem to him first and sole ; and to them he clings like
a barnacle. But to our indifferent, nothing is so vulgar
as close suction. He will never tighten his fingers on
loaned opportunity; he is a gentleman, the hero of the
habitually relaxed grasp. A light unprejudiced hold
on his profits strikes him as decent and comely, though
his true artistic pleasure is still in ''fallings from us,
vanishings." It costs him little to loose and to forego,
to unlace his tentacles, and from the many who push
hard behind, to retire, as it were, on a never-guessed-at
competency, "richer than untempted kings." He would
not be a life-prisoner, in ever so charming a bower.
While the tranquil Sabine Farm is his delight, well he
knows that on the dark trail ahead of him, even Sabine
Farms are not sequacious. Thus he learns betimes to
play the guest under his own cedars, and, with disci-
plinary intent, goes often from them ; and, hearing his

The Precept of Peace 225

heart-strings snap the third night he is away, rejoices
that he is again a freedman. Where his foot is planted
(though it root not anywhere), he calls that spot home.
No Unitarian in locality, it follows that he is the best
of travelers, tangential merely, and pleased with each
new vista of the human Past. He sometimes wishes
his understanding less, that he might itch deliciously
with a prejudice. With cosmic congruities, great and
general forces, he keeps, all along, a tacit understand-
ing, such as one has with beloved relatives at a dis-
tance ; and his finger, airily inserted in his outer pocket,
is really upon the pulse of eternity. His vocation, how-
ever, is to bury himself in the minor and immediate
task; and from his intent manner, he gets confounded,
promptly and permanently, with the victims of com-
mercial ambition.

The true use of the much-praised Lucius Gary, Vis-
count Falkland, has hardly been apprehended : he is
simply the patron saint of indifferents. From first to
last, almost alone in that discordant time, he seems to
have heard far-off resolving harmonies, and to have
been rapt away with foreknowledge. Battle, to which
all knights were bred, was penitential to him. It was
but a childish means: and to what end? He mean-
while— and no man carried his will in better abeyance
to the scheme of the universe — wajited no diligence in
camp or council. Cares sat handsomely on him who

226 Louise lynogen Guiney

cared not at all, who won small comfort from the
cause which his conscience finally espoused. He
labored to be a doer, to stand well with observers ; and
none save his intimate friends read his agitation and
profound weariness. "I am so much taken notice of,"
he writes, ''for an impatient desire for peace, that it
is necessary I should likewise make it appear how it is
not out of fear for the utmost hazard of war." And
so, driven from the ardor he had to the simulation of
the ardor he lacked, loyally daring, a sacrifice to one of
two transient opinions, and inly impartial as a star,
Lord Falkland fell : the young never-to-be-forgotten
martyr of Newburg field. The imminent deed he
made a work of art; and the station of the mo-
ment the only post of honor. Life and death may be
all one to such a man : but he will at least take the
noblest pains to discriminate between Tweedledum and
Tweedledee, if he has to write a book about the varia-
tions of their antennae. And like the Carolian ex-
emplar is the disciple. The indifferent is a good thinker,
or a good fighter. He is no ''immartial minion," as
dear old Chapman suffers Hector to call Tydides.
Nevertheless, his sign-manual is content with humble
and stagnant conditions. Talk of scaling the Hima-
layas of life affects him, very palpably, as "tall talk."
He deals not with things, but with the impressions and
analogies of things. The material counts for nothing

The Precept of Peace 227

with him : he has moulted it away. Not so sure of the
identity of the higher course of action as he is of his
consecrating dispositions, he feels that he may make
heaven again, out of sundries, as he goes. Shall not a
beggarly duty, discharged with perfect temper, land
him in ''the out-courts of Glory," quite as successfully
as a grand Sunday-school excursion to front the cruel
Paynim foe ? He thinks so. Experts have thought so
before him. Francis Drake, with the national alarum
instant in his ears, desired first to win at bowls, on
the Devon sward, ''and afterwards to settle with the
Don." No one will claim a buccaneering hero for an
indifferent, however. The Jesuit novices were ball-
playing almost at that very time, three hundred years
ago, when some too speculative companion, figuring the
end of the world in a few moments (with just leisure
enough, between, to be shriven in chapel, according to
his own thrifty mind), asked Louis of Gonzaga how
he, on his part, should employ the precious interval.
"I should go on with the game," said the most inno-
cent and most ascetic youth among them. But to cite
the behavior of any of the saints is to step over the
playful line allotted. Indifference of the mundane
brand is not to be confounded with their detachment,
which is emancipation wrought in the soul, and the
ineffable efflorescence of the Christian spirit. Like
most supernatural virtues, it has a laic shadow; the

228 Louise Imogen Guiney

counsel to abstain, and to be unsolicitous, is one not
only of perfection, but also of polity. A very little
nonadhesion to common affairs, a little reserve of un-
concern, and the gay spirit of sacrifice, provide the
moral immunity which is the only real estate. The
indifferent believes in storms : since tales of shipwreck
encompass him. But once among his own kind, he
wonders that folk should be circumvented by merely
extraneous powers! His favorite catch, w^oven in
among escaped dangers, rises through the roughest
weather, and daunts it:

"Now strike your sailes, ye jolly mariners,
For we be come into a quiet rode."

No slave to any vicissitude, his imagination is, on the
contrary, the cheerful obstinate tyrant of all that is.
He lives, as Keats once said of himself, ''in a thousand
worlds," withdrawing at will from one to another,
often curtailing his circumference to enlarge his
liberty. His universe is a universe of balls, like those
which the cunning Oriental carvers make out of ivory;
each entire surface perforated with the same delicate
pattern, each moving prettily and inextricably within
the other, and all but the outer one impossible to
handle. In some such innermost asylum the right sort
of dare-devil sits smiling, while men rage or weep.

ON LYING AWAKE AT NIGHT
By Stewart Edward White

This is from The Forest— one of Stewart Edward White's
many dehghtful volumes. A very large public has enjoyed Mr.
Whites writmgs— many of his readers, perhaps, without accu-
rately realizing how extraordinarily good they are.

Mr. White was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1873 ; studied
at the University of Michigan; has hunted big game in Africa;
served as major of field artillery, 1917-18; and is a Fellow of
the Royal Geographical Society. His first book, The Westerners
was published in 1901, since when they have followed regularly!

''Who hath lain alone to hear the wild goose cryf"

About once in so often you are due to lie awake at
night. Why this is so I have never been able to dis-
cover. It apparently comes from no predisposing un-
easiness of indigestion, no rashness in the matter of
too much tea or tobacco, no excitation of unusual inci-
dent or stimulating conversation. In fact, you turn
in with the expectation of rather a good night's rest.
Almost at once the little noises of the forest grow
larger, blend in the hollow bigness of the first drowse;
your thoughts drift idly back and forth between reality
and dream ; when — snap! — you are broad awake !

Perhaps the reservoir of your vital forces is full to
the overflow of a little waste; or perhaps, more subtly,

229

230 Stewart Edward White

the great Mother insists thus that you enter the temple
of her larger mysteries.

For, unlike mere insomnia, lying awake at night in
the woods is pleasant. The eager, nervous straining
for sleep gives way to a delicious indifference. You do
not care. Your mind is cradled in an exquisite poppy-
suspension of judgment and of thought. Impressions
slip vaguely into your consciousness and as vaguely
out again. Sometimes they stand stark and naked for
your inspection ; sometimes they lose themselves in the
mist of half-sleep. Always they lay soft velvet fingers
on the drowsy imagination, so that in their caressing
you feel the vaster spaces from which they have come.
Peaceful-brooding your faculties receive. Hearing,
sight, smell — all are preternaturally keen to whatever
of sound and sight and woods perfume is abroad
through the night ; and yet at the same time active ap-
preciation dozes, so these things lie on it sweet and
cloying like fallen rose-leaves.

In such circumstance you will hear what the voy-
ageurs call the voices of the rapids. Many people never
hear them at all. They speak very soft and low and
distinct beneath the steady roar and dashing, beneath
even the lesser tinklings and gurglings whose quality
superimposes them over the louder sounds. They are
like the tear-forms swimming across the field of vision,
which disappear so quickly when you concentrate your

On Lying Awake at Night 231

sight to look at them, and which reappear so magically
when again your gaze turns vacant. In the stillness of
your hazy half-consciousness they speak; when you
bend your attention to listen, they are gone, and only
the tumults and the tinklings remain.

But in the moments of their audibility they are very
distinct. Just as often an odor will wake all a van-
ished memory, so these voices, by the force of a large
impressionism, suggest whole scenes. Far off are the
cling-clang-cling of chimes and the swell-and-fall mur-
mur of a multitude en fete, so that subtly you feel the
gray old town, with its walls, the crowded market-
place, the decent peasant crowd, the booths, the mellow
church building with its bells, the warm, dust-moted
sun. Or, in the pauses between the swish-dash-dash-
ings of the waters, sound faint and clear voices singing
intermittently, calls, distant notes of laughter, as
though many canoes were working against the current
— only the flotilla never gets any nearer, nor the voices
louder. The voyageurs call these mist people thn
Huntsmen ; and look frightened. To each is his vision,
according to his experience. The nations of the earth
whisper to their exiled sons through the voices of the
rapids. Curiously enough, by all reports, they suggest
always peaceful scenes — a harvest-field, a street fair, a
Sunday morning in a cathedral town, careless travelers
— never the turmoils and struggles. Perhaps this is

232 Stewart Edward White

the great Mother's compensation in a harsh mode of
life.

Nothing is more fantastically unreal to tell about,
nothing more concretely real to experience, than this
undernote of the quick water. And when you do lie
awake at night, it is always making its unobtrusive
appeal. Gradually its hypnotic spell works. The dis-
tant chimes ring louder and nearer as you cross the
borderland of sleep. And then outside the tent some
little woods noise snaps the thread. An owl hoots, a
whippoorwill cries, a twig cracks beneath the cautious
prowl of some night creature — at once the yellow sunlit
French meadows pufif away — you are staring at the
blurred image of the moon spraying through the tex-
ture of your tent.

The voices of the rapids have dropped into the back-
ground, as have the dashing noises of the stream.
Through the forest is a great silence, but no stillness
at all. The whippoorwill swings down and up the short
curve of his regular song; over and over an owl says
his rapid whoo, whoo, whoo. These, with the ceaseless
dash of the rapids, are the web on which the night
traces her more delicate embroideries of the unex-
pected. Distant crashes, single and impressive;
stealthy footsteps near at hand ; the subdued scratch-
ing of claws; a faint snijf! sniff! sniff! of inquiry; the
sudden clear tin-horn ko-ko-ko-6h of the little owl; the

On Lying Awake at Night 233

mournful, long-drawn-out cry of the loon, instinct with
the spirit of loneliness; the ethereal call-note of the
birds of passage high in the air; a patter, patter, patter,
among the dead leaves, immediately stilled; and then
at the last, from the thicket close at hand, the beautiful
silver purity of the white-throated sparrow — the
nightingale of the North — trembling with the ecstasy
of beauty, as though a shimmering moonbeam had
turned to sound; and all the while the blurred figure
of the moon mounting to the ridge-line of your tent —
these things combine subtly, until at last the great
Silence of which they are a part overarches the night
and draws you forth to contemplation.

No beverage is more grateful than the cup of spring
water you drink at such a time; no moment more re-
freshing than that in which you look about you at the
darkened forest. You have cast from you with the
warm blanket the drowsiness of dreams. A coolness,
physical and spiritual, bathes you from head to foot.
All your senses are keyed to the last vibrations. You
hear the littler night prowlers ; you glimpse the greater.
A faint, searching woods perfume of dampness greets
your nostrils. And somehow, mysteriously, in a man-*
ner not to be understood, the forces of the world seem
in suspense, as though a touch might crystallize infinite
possibilities into infinite power and motion. But the
touch lacks. The forces hover on the edge of action.

234 Stewart Edivard White

unheeding the little noises. In all humbleness and awe,
you are a dweller of the Silent Places.

At such a time you will meet with adventures. One
night we put fourteen inquisitive porcupines out of
camp. Near McGregor's Bay I discovered in the large
grass park of my camp-site nine deer, cropping the
herbage like so many beautiful ghosts. A friend tells
me of a fawn that every night used to sleep outside his
tent and within a foot of his head, probably by way of
protection against wolves. Its mother had in all likeli-
hood been killed. The instant my friend moved to-
ward the tent opening the little creature would disap-
pear, and it was always gone by earliest daylight.
Nocturnal bears in search of pork are not uncommon.
But even though your interest meets nothing but the
bats and the woods shadows and the stars, that few
moments of the sleeping world forces is a psychical ex-
perience to be gained in no other way. You cannot
know the night by sitting up; she will sit up with you.
Only by coming into her presence from the borders of
sleep can you meet her face to face in her intimate
mood.

The night wind from the river, or from the open
spaces of the wilds, chills you after a time. You begin
to think of your blankets. In a few moments you roll
yourself in their soft wool. Instantly it is morning.

And, strange to say, you have not to pay by going

On Lying Awake at Night 23?

through the day unrefreshed. You may feel like turn-
ing in at eight instead of nine, and you may fall asleep
with unusual promptitude, but your journey will begin
clear-headedly, proceed springily, and end with much
in reserve. No languor, no dull headache, no exhaus-
tion, follows your experience. For this once your two
hours of sleep have been as effective as nine.

A WOODLAND VALENTINE
By Marian Storm

Marian Storm was born in Stormville, N. Y., and educated
at Penn Hall, Chambersburg, Pa., and at Smith College. She
did editorial and free-lance work in New York after graduation,
and later went to Washington to become private secretary to the
Argentine Ambassador. Since 1918 she has been connected with
the New York Evening Post.

This essay comes from Minstrel Weather, a series of open-air
vignettes which circle the zodiac with the attentive eye of a
naturalist and the enchanted ardor of a poet

Forces astir in the deepest roots grow restless be-
neath the lock of frost. Bulbs try the door. Febru-
ary's stillness is charged with a faint anxiety, as if
the powers of light, pressing up from the earth's center
and streaming down from the stronger sun, had
troubled the buried seeds, who strive to answer their
liberator, so that the guarding mother must whisper
over and over, "Not yet, not yet !" Better to stay be-
hind the frozen gate than to come too early up into
realms where the wolves of cold are still aprowl.
Wisely the snow places a white hand over eager life
unseen, but perceived in February's woods as a swim-
mer feels the changing moods of water in a lake fed
by springs. Only the thick stars, closer and more
companionable than in months of foliage, burn alert

and serene. In February the Milky Way is revealed

236

A Woodland Valentine 237

divinely lucent to lonely peoples — herdsmen, moun-
taineers, fishermen, trappers — who are abroad in the
starlight hours of this grave and silent time of year.
It is in the long, frozen nights that the sky has most
red flowers.

February knows the beat of twilight wings. Drift-
ing north again come birds who only pretended to
forsake us — adventurers, not so fond of safety but that
they dare risk finding how snow bunting and pine finch
have plundered the cones of the evergreens, while
chickadees, sparrows, and crows are supervising from
established stations all the more domestic supplies
available, a sparrow often making it possible to annoy
even a duck out of her share of cracked corn. Ranged
along a brown-draped oak branch in the waxing light,
crows show a lordly glistening of feathers. (Sun on a
sweeping wing in flight has the quality of sun on a
ripple.) Where hemlocks gather, deep in somber
woods, the great horned owl has thus soon, perhaps
working amid snows at her task, built a nest wherein
March will find sturdy balls of fluff. The thunderous
love song of her mate sounds through the timber. By
the time the wren has nested these winter babies will
be solemn with the wisdom of their famous race.

There is no season like the end of February for
cleaning out brooks. Hastening yellow waters toss a
dreary wreckage of torn or ashen leaves, twigs, acorn

238 Marian Storm

cups, stranded rafts of bark, and buttonballs from the
sycamore, never to come to seed. Standing on one
bank or both, according to the sundering flood's ambi-
tion, the knight with staff and bold forefinger sets the
water princess free. She goes then curtsying and
dimpHng over the shining gravel, sHding from beneath
the ice that roofs her on the uplands down to the
softer valleys, where her quickened step will be heard
by the frogs in their mansions of mud, and the fish,
recluses in rayless pools, will rise to the light she
brings.

Down from the frozen mountains, in summer, birds
and winds must bear the seed of alpine flowers — lilies
that lean against unmelting snows, poppies, bright-
colored herbs, and the palely gleaming, fringed beauties
that change names with countries. How just and rea-
sonable it would seem to be that flowers which edge
the ice in July should consent to bloom in lowlands
no colder in February ! The pageant of blue, magenta,
and scarlet on the austere upper slopes of the Rockies,
where nights are bitter to the summer wanderer —
why should it not flourish to leeward of a valley barn
in months when icicles hang from the eaves in this
tamer setting? But no. Mountain tempests are en-
durable to the silken-petaled. The treacherous lowland
winter, with its coaxing suns followed by roaring deso-
lation, is for blooms bred in a different tradition.

A Woodland Valentine 239

The light is clear but hesitant, a delicate wine, by no
means the mighty vintage of April. February has no
intoxication; the vague eagerness that gives the air a
pulse where fields lie voiceless comes from the secret
stirring of imprisoned life. Spring and sunrise are
forever miracles, but the early hour of the wonder
hardly hints the exuberance of its fulfilment. Even
the forest dwellers move gravely, thankful for any
promise of kindness from the lord of day as he hangs
above a sea-gray landscape, but knowing well that their
long duress is not yet to end. Deer pathetically haunt
the outskirts of farms, gazing upon cattle feeding in
winter pasture from the stack, and often, after dark,
clearing the fences and robbing the same disheveled
storehouse. Not a chipmunk winks from the top rail.
The woodchuck, after his single expeditionary effort
on Candlemas, which he is obliged to make for man-
kind's enlightenment, has retired without being seen,
in sunshine or shadow, and has not the slightest inten-
tion of disturbing himself just yet. Though snow-
drops may feel uneasy, he knows too much about the
Ides of March ! Quietest of all Northern woods crea-
tures, the otter slides from one ice-hung waterfall \.o
the next. The solitary scamperer left is the cottontail,
appealing because he is the most pursued and politest
of the furry; faithfully trying to give no offense,
except when starvation points to winter cabbage, he

240 Marian Storm

is none the less fey. So is the mink, though he moves
like a phantom.

Mosses, whereon March in coming treads first, show
one hue brighter in the swamps. Pussy willows have
made a gray daw^n in viny caverns where the day's
ow^n daw^n looks in but faintly, and the flushing of the
red willow betrays reveries of a not impossible cowslip
upon the bank beneath. The blue jay has mentioned it
in the course of his voluble recollections. He is un-
willing to prophesy arbutus, but he will just hint that
when the leaves in the wood lot show through snow
as early as this . . . Once he found a hepatica bud the
last day of February . . . Speaking with his old friend,
the muskrat, last week . . . And when you can see
red pebbles in the creek at five o'clock in the afternoon
. . . But it is no use to expect yellow orchids on the
west knoll this spring, for some people found them
there last year, and after that you might as well . . .
Of course cowslips beside red willows are remarkably
pretty, just as blue jays in a cedar with blue berries.
. . . He is interminable, but then he has seen a great
deal of life. And February needs her blue jays' un-
wearied and conquering faith.

THE ELEMENTS OF POETRY
By George Santayana

George Santayana was born in Madrid in 1863, of Spanish
parentage. He graduated from Harvard in 1886, and taught
philosophy there, 1889-1911. He lives now, I think, in England.
I must be frank: except his poems, I only know his work in
that enthralling volume, Little Essays Drazvn from the Writings
of George Santayana, edited by L. Pearsall Smith. Much of it
is too esoteric for my grasp, but Mr. Smith's redaction brings the
fascination of Santayana's philosophy within the compass of
what Tennyson called "a second-rate sensitive mind"; and, if
mine is a criterion, such will find it of the highest stimulus. This
discourse on poetry seems to me one of the most pregnant
utterances on the subject. It is not perfectly appreciated by
merely one reading; but even if you have to become a poet to
enjoy it fully, that will do yourself least harm.

If poetry in its higher reaches is more philosophical
than history, because it presents the memorable types
of men and things apart from unmeaning circum-
stances, so in its primary substance and texture poetry
is more philosophical than prose because it is nearer to
our immediate experience. Poetry breaks up the trite
conceptions designated by current words into the sensu-
ous qualities out of which those conceptions were origi-
nally put together. We name what we conceive and
believe in, not what we see; things, not images; souls,
not voices and silhouettes. This naming, with the
whole education of the senses which it accompanies,
subserves the uses of life; in order to thread our way

241

242 George Santayana

through the labyrinth of objects which assault us, we
must make a great selection in our sensuous experi-
ence; half of what we see and hear we must pass over
as insignificant, while we piece out the other half with
such an ideal complement as is necessary to turn it
into a fixed and well-ordered conception of the world.
This labor of perception and understanding, this spell-
ing of the material meaning of experience, is enshrined
in our workaday language and ideas; ideas w^hich are
literally poetic in the sense that they are *'made" (for
every conception in an adult mind is a fiction), but
which are at the same time prosaic because they are
made economically, by abstraction, and for use.

When the child of poetic genius, who has learned
this intellectual and utilitarian language in the cradle,
goes afield and gathers for himself the aspects of na-
ture, he begins to encumber his mind with the many
living impressions which the intellect rejected, and
which the language of the intellect can hardly convey;
he labors with his nameless burden of perception, and
wastes himself in aimless impulses of emotion and
reverie, until finally the method of some art offers a
vent to his inspiration, or to such part of it as can sur-
vive the test of time and the discipline of expression.

The poet retains by nature the innocence of the eye,
or recovers it easily; he disintegrates the fictions of
common perception into their sensuous elements,

The Elements of Poetry 243

gathers these together again into chance groups as the
accidents of his environment or the affinities of his
temperament may conjoin them; and this wealth of
sensation and this freedom of fancy, which make an
extraordinary ferment in his ignorant heart, presently
bubble over into some kind of utterance.

The fullness and sensuousness of such effusions
bring them nearer to our actual perceptions than com-
mon discourse could come; yet they may easily seem
remote, overloaded, and obscure to those accustomed to
think entirely in symbols, and never to be interrupted
in the algebraic rapidity of their thinking by a mo-
ment's pause and examination of heart, nor ever to
plunge for a moment into that torrent of sensation and
imagery over which the bridge of prosaic associations
habitually carries us safe and dry to some conventional
act. How slight that bridge commonly is, how much
an affair of trestles and wire, we can hardly conceive
until we have trained ourselves to an extreme sharpness
of introspection. But psychologists have discovered,
what laymen generally will confess, that we hurry by
the procession of our mental images as we do by the
traffic of the street, intent on business, gladly for-
getting the noise and movement of the scene, and look-
ing only for the corner we would turn or the door we
would enter. Yet in our alertest moment the depths
of the soul are still dreaming; the real world stands

244 George Santayana

drawn in bare outline against a background of chaos
and unrest. Our logical thoughts dominate experi-
ence only as the parallels and meridians make a
checkerboard of the sea. They guide our voyage with-
out cor^trolling the waves, which toss forever in spite
of ou/ ability to ride over them to our chosen ends.
Sanity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a
dream controlled.

Out of the neglected riches of this dream the poet
fetches his wares. He dips into the chaos that under-
lies the rational shell of the world and brings up some
superfluous image, some emotion dropped by the way,
and reattaches it to the present object; he reinstates
things unnecessary, he emphasizes things ignored, he
paints in again into the landscape the tints which the
intellect has allowed to fade from it. If he seems
sometimes to obscure a fact, it is only because he is
restoring an experience. The first element which the
intellect rejects in forming its ideas of things is the
emotion which accompanies the perception ; and this
emotion is the first thing the poet restores. He stops
at the image, because he stops to enjoy. He wanders
into the bypaths of association because the bypaths are
delightful. The love of beauty which made him give
measure and cadence to his words, the love of harmony
which made him rhyme them, reappear in his imagina-
tion and make him select there also the material that is

The Elements of Poetry 245

itself beautiful, or capable of assuming beautiful forms.
The link that binds together the ideas, sometimes so
wide apart, which his wit assimilates, is most often
the link of emotion; they have in common some element
of beauty or of horror.

NOCTURNE
By Simeon Strunsky

Simeon Strunsky is one of the most brilliant and certainly the
most modest of American journalists. I regret that I cannot
praise him, for at present we both work in the same office, and
kinds words uttered in public would cause him to avoid me for-
ever. All that is necessary is for my readers to examine his
books and they will say for themselves what I am restrained
from hinting. There is a spontaneous play of chaff in Mr.
Strunsky's lighter vein which is unsurpassed by any American
humorist; his more inward musing is well exemplified by this
selection (from Fost-hnprcssions, 1914). If you reaJ Post-
Impressions, The Patient Observer, Belsliaasar Court, Professor
Latimer's Progress and Sinbad and His Friends, you will have
made a fair start.

Strunsky was born in Russia in 1879; studied at the Horace
Mann High School (New York) and graduated from Columbia
University in 1900. He worked on the staff of the New Inter-
national Encyclopaedia in 1900-06, and since then has been on the
staff of the New York Evening Post, of which he is now editor.

Once every three months, with fair regularity, she
was brought into the Night Court, found guilty, and
fined. She came in between eleven o'clock and mid-
night, when the traffic of the court is at its heaviest,
and it would be an hour, perhaps, before she was called
to the bar. When her turn came she would rise from
her seat at one end of the prisoners' bench and confront
the magistrate.

Her eyes did not reach to the level of the magis-
trate's desk. A policeman in citizen's clothes would

mount the witness stand, take oath with a seriousness

246

Nocturne 247

of mien which was surprising, in view of the fre
quency with which he was called upon to repeat the
formula, and testify in an illiterate drone to a definite
infraction of the law of the State, committed in his
presence and with his encouragement. While he spoke
the magistrate would look at the ceiling. When she
was called upon to answer she defended herself with
an obvious lie or two, while the magistrate looked over
her head. He would then condemn her to pay the
sum of ten dollars to the State and let her go.

She came to look forward to her visits at the Night
Court.

The Night Court is no longer a center of general
interest. During the first few months after it was
established, two or three years ago, it was one of the
great sights of a great city. For the newspapers it
was a rich source of human-interest stories. It re-
placed Chinatown in its appeal to visitors from out-of-
town. It stirred even the languid pulses of the native
inhabitant with its offerings of something new in the
way of "life.*' The sociologists, sincere and amateur,
crowded the benches and took notes.

To-day the novelty is worn off. The newspapers
long ago abandoned the Night Court, clergymen go to
it rarely for their texts, and the tango has taken its
place. But the sociologists and the casual visitor have

248 Simeon Strunsky

not disappeared. Serious people, anxious for an im-
mediate vision of the pity of life, continue to fill the
benches comfortably. No session of the court is with-
out its little group of social investigators, among whom
the women are in the majority. Many of them are
young women, exceedingly sympathetic, handsomely
gowned, and very well taken care of.

As she sat at one end of the prisoners' bench waiting
her turn before the magistrate's desk, she would cast
a sidelong glance over the railing that separated her
from the handsomely gowned, gently bred, sympathetic
young women in the audience. She observed with
extraordinary admiration and delight those charming
faces softened in pity, the graceful bearing, the admir-
ably constructed yet simple coiffures, the elegance of
dress, which she compared with the best that the win-
dows in Sixth Avenue could show. She was amazed to
find such gowns actually being worn instead of remain-
ing as an unattainable ideal on smiling lay figures in
the shop windows.

Occupants of the prisoners* bench are not supposed
to stare at the spectators. She had to steal a glance
now and then. Her visits to the Night Court had be-
come so much a matter of routine that she would ven-
ture a peep over the railing while the case immediately
preceding her own was being tried. Once or twice she
was surprised by the clerk who called her name. She

Nocturne 249

stood up mechanically and faced the magistrate as
Officer Smith, in civilian clothes, mounted the witness
stand.

She had no grudge against Officer Smith. She did
not visualize him either as a person or as a part of a
system. He was merely an incident of her trade.
She had neither the training nor the imagination to
look behind Officer Smith and see a communal policy
which has not the power to suppress, nor the courage to
acknowledge, nor the skill to regulate, and so contents
itself with sending out full-fed policemen in civilian
clothes to work up the evidence that defends society
against her kind through the imposition of a ten-
dollar fine.

To some of the women on the visitors* benches the
cruelty of the process came home : this business of
setting a two-hundred-pound policeman in citizen's
clothes, backed up by magistrates, clerks, court criers,
interpreters, and court attendants, to worrying a ten-
dollar fine out of a half-grown woman under an
enormous imitation ostrich plume. The professional .
sociologists were chiefly interested in the money cost
of this process to the tax-payer, and they took notes
on the proportion of first offenders. Yet the Night
Court is a remarkable advance in civilization.
Formerly, in addition to her fine, the prisoner would
pay a commission to the professional purveyor of bail

250 Simeon Strunsky

Sometimes, if the magistrate was young or new to
the business, she would be given a chance against
Officer Smith. She would be called to the witness
chair and under oath be allowed to elaborate on the
obvious lies w^hich constituted her usual defense. This
would give her the opportunity, between the magis-
trate's questions, of sweeping the courtroom with a
full, hungry look for as much as half a minute at a
time. She saw the women in the audience only, and
their clothes. The pity in their eyes did not move her,
because she was not in the least interested in what
they thought, but in how they looked and what they
wore. They were part of a world which she would
read about — she read very little — in the society col-
umns of the Sunday newspaper. They were the
women around whom headlines were written and whose
pictures were printed frequently on the first page.

She could study them with comparative leisure in
the Night Court. Outside in the course of her daily
routine she might catch an occasional glimpse of these
same women, through the windows of a passing taxi,
or in the matinee crowds, or going in and out of the
fashionable shops. But her work took her seldom into
the region of taxicabs and fashionable shops. The
nature of her occupation kept her to furtive corners
and the dark side of streets. Nor was she at such
times in the mood for just appreciation of the beau-

Nocturne 251

tiful things in life. More than any other walk of life,
hers was of an exacting nature, calling for intense
powers of concentration both as regards the public and
the police. It was different in the Night Court. Here,
having nothing to fear and nothing out of the usual
to hope for, she might give herself up to the esthetic
contemplation of a beautiful world of which, at any
other time, she could catch mere fugitive aspects.

Sometimes I wonder why people think that life is
only what they see and hear, and not what they read
of. Take the Night Court. The visitor really sees
nothing and hears nothing that he has not read a thou-
sand times in his newspaper and had it described in
greater detail and with better-trained powers of obser-
vation than he can bring to bear in person. What new
phase of life is revealed by seeing in the body, say, a
dozen practitioners of a trade of whom we know there
are several tens of thousands in New York? They
have been described by the human-interest reporters,
analyzed by the statisticians, defended by the social
revolutionaries, and explained away by the optimists.
For that matter, to the faithful reader of the news-
papers, daily and Sunday, what can there be new in
this world from the Pyramids by moonlight to the
habits of the night prowler? Can the upper classes
really acquire for themselves, through slumming par-
ties and visits to the Night Court, anything like the

252 Simeon Strunsky

knowledge that books and newspapers can furnish
them ? Can the lower classes ever hope to obtain that
complete view of the Fifth Avenue set which the Sun-
day columns offer them? And yet there the case
stands : only by seeing and hearing for ourselves, how-
ever imperfectly, do we get the sense of reality.

That is why our criminal courts are probably our
most influential schools of democracy. More than our
settlement houses, more than our subsidized dancing-
schools for shopgirls, they encourage the get-together
process through w'hich one-half the v^orld learns how
the other half lives. On either side of the railing of
the prisoners' cage is an audience and a stage.

That is why she would look forward to her regular
visits at the Night Court. She saw life there.

BEER AND CIDER
By George Saintsbury

How pleasant it Is to find the famous Professor Saintsbury—
known to students as the author of histories of the EngHsh and
French hteratures, the History of Criticism and History of Eng-
lish Prosody — spending the evening so hospitably in his cellar. I
print this— from his downright delightful Notes on a Cellar Book
— as a kind of tantalizing penance. It is a charming example
of how pleasantly a great scholar can unbend on occasion.

George Saintsbury, born in 1845, studied at Merton College,
Oxford, taught school 1868-76, was a journalist in London
1876-95, and held the chair of English Literature at Edinburgh
University, 1895-1915. If you read Notes on a Cellar Book, as
you should, you will agree that it is a charmingly light-hearted
causerie for a gentleman to publish at the age of seventy-five.
More than ever one feels that sound liquor, in moderation, is a
preservative of both body and wit.

There is no beverage which I have liked "to Hve
with" more than Beer; but I have never had a cellar
large enough to accommodate much of it, or an estab-
lishment numerous enough to justify the accommoda-
tion. In the good days when servants expected beer,
but did not expect to be treated otherwise than as
servants, a cask or two was necessary; and persons
who were "quite" generally took care that the small
beer they drank should be the same as that which they
gave to their domestics, though they might have other
sorts as well. For these better sorts at least the good
old rule was, when you began on one cask always to

254 George Saintsbury

have in another. Even Cobbett, whose belief in beer
was the noblest feature in his character, allowed that
it required some keeping. The curious ''white ale,"
or lober agol — which, within the memory of man, used
to exist in Devonshire and Cornwall, but which, even
half a century ago, I have vainly sought there — was,
I believe, drunk quite new; but then it was not pure
malt and not hopped at all, but had eggs ("pullet-
sperm in the brewage") and other foreign bodies in it.

I did once drink, at St. David's, ale so new that it
frothed from the cask as creamily as if it had been
bottled : and I wondered whether the famous beer of
Bala, which Borrow found so good at his first visit
and so bad at his second, had been like it.^

On the other hand, the very best Bass I ever drank
had had an exactly contrary experience. In the year
1875, when I was resident at Elgin, I and a friend now
dead, the Procurator-Fiscal of the district, devoted the
May ''Sacrament holidays," which were then still kept
in those remote parts, to a walking tour up the Find-
horn and across to Loch Ness and Glen Urquhart.
At the Freeburn Inn on the first-named river we

1 This visit (in the early eighties) had another relish. The
inn coffee-room had a copy of Mr. Freeman's book on the adjoin-
ing Cathedral, and this was copiously annotated in a beautiful
and scholarly hand, but in a most virulent spirit. "Why can't
you call things by their plain names?" (in reference to the his-
torian's Macaulayesque periphrases) etc. I have often wondered
who the annotator was.

Beer and Cider 255

found some beer of singular excellence : and, asking
the damsel who waited on us about it, were informed
that a cask of Bass had been put in during the pre-
vious October, but, owing to a sudden break in the
weather and the departure of all visitors, had never
been tapped till our arrival.

Beer of ordinary strength left too long in the cask
gets ''hard" of course; but no one who deserves to
drink it would drink it from anything but the cask
if he could help it. Jars are makeshifts, though use-
ful makeshifts: and small beer will not keep in them
for much more than a week. Nor are the very small
barrels, known by various affectionate diminutives
("pin," etc.) in the country districts, much to be
recommended. 'We'll drink it in the firkin, my boy I"
is the lowest admission in point of volume that should
be allowed. Of one such firkin I have a pleasant mem-
ory and memorial, though it never reposed in my home
cellar. It was just before the present century opened,
and some years before we Professors in Scotland had,
of our own motion and against considerable opposi-
tion, given up half of the old six months' holiday with-
out asking for or receiving a penny more salary. (I
have since chuckled at the horror and wrath with
which Mr. Smillie and Mr. Thomas would hear of
such profligate conduct.) One could therefore move
about with fairly long halts : and I had taken from a

256 George Saintshury

friend a house at Abingdon for some time. So, though
I could not even then drink quite as much beer as I
could thirty years earlier a little higher up the Thames,
it became necessary to procure a cask. It came — one
of Bass's minor mildnesses — affectionately labeled
"Mr. George Saintsbury. Full to the bung." I de-
tached the card, and I believe I have it to this day as
my choicest (because quite unsolicited) testimonial.

Very strong beer permits itself, of course, to be
bottled and kept in bottles : but I rather doubt whether
it also is not best from the wood ; though it is equally
of course, much easier to cellar it and keep it bottled.
Its kinds are various and curious. "Scotch ale" is
famous, and at its best (I never drank better than
Younger's) excellent: but its tendency, I think, is to
be too sweet. I once invested in some — not Younger's
4 — which I kept for nearly sixteen years, and which
was still treacle at the end. Bass's No. i requires no
praises. Once when living in the Cambridgeshire vil-
lage mentioned earlier I had some, bottled in Cambridge
itself, of great age and excellence. Indeed, two guests,
though both of them were Cambridge men, and should
have had what Mr. Lang once called the "robust"
habits of that University, fell into one ditch after par-
taking of it. (I own that the lanes thereabouts are
very dark.) In former days, though probably not at
present, you could often find rather choice specimens

Beer and Cider 257

of strong beer produced at small breweries in the
country. I remember such even in the Channel Islands.
And I suspect the Universities themselves have been
subject to ''declensions and fallings off." I know
that in my undergraduate days at Merton we always
had proper beer-glasses, like the old "flute" cham-
pagnes, served regularly at cheese-time with a most
noble beer called ** Archdeacon," which was then actu-
ally brewed in the sacristy of the College chapel. I
have since — a slight sorrow to season the joy of rein-
statement there — been told that it is now obtained from
outside.^ And All Souls is the only other college in
which, from actual recent experience, I can imagine
the possibility of the exorcism,

Strongbeerum ! discede a lay-fratre Petro,
if lay-brother Peter were so silly as to abuse, or play
tricks with, the good gift.

2 When I went up this March to help man the last ditch for
Greek, I happened to mention "Archdeacon" : and my interlocu-
tor told me that he believed no college now brewed within its
walls. After the defeat, I thought of the stages of the Decline
and Fall of Things : and how a sad but noble ode might be writ-
ten (by the right man) on the Fates of Greek and Beer at
Oxford. He would probably refer in the first strophe to the
close of the Eumenides ; in its antistrophe to Mr. Swinburne's
great adaptation thereof in regard to Carlyle and Newman ;
while the epode and any reduplication of the parts would be
occupied by showing how the departing entities were of no
equivocal magnificence like the Eumenides themselves ; of no
flawed perfection (at least as it seemed to their poet) like the
two great English writers, but wholly admirable and beneficent —
too good for the generation who would banish them, and whom
they banished.

258 George Saintsbury

I have never had many experiences of real "home-
brewed," but two which I had were pleasing. There
was much home-brewing in East Anglia at the time I
lived there, and I once got the village carpenter to
give me some of his own manufacture. It w^as as
good light ale as I ever wish to drink (many times
better than the wretched stuff that Dora has foisted
on us), and he told me that, counting in every expense
for material, cost and w^ear of plant, etc., it came to
about a penny ^ a quart. The other was very different.
The late Lord de Tabley — better or at least longer
known as Mr. Leicester Warren — once gave a dinner
at the Athenaeum at which I was present, and had up
from his Cheshire cellars some of the old ale for
which that county is said to be famous, to make flip
after dinner. It was shunned by most of the pusillani-
mous guests, but not by me, and it was excellent. But
I should like to have tried it unflipped.*

3 This was one of the best illustrations of the old phrase, "a
good pennyworth," that I ever knew for certain. I add the two
last words because of a mysterious incident of my youth. I and
one of my sisters were sitting at a window in a certain seaside
place when we heard, both of us distinctly and repeatedly, this
mystic street cry: "A bible and a pillow-case for a penny!" I
rushed downstairs to secure this bargain, but the crier was now
far off, and it was too late.

^ By the way, are they still as good for flip at Xew College,
Oxford, as they were in the days when it numbered hardly any
undergraduates except scholars, and one scholar of my acquaint-
ance had to himself a set of three rooms and a garden? And
is "The Island" at Kennington still famous for the same excellent
compound?

Beer and Cider 259

I never drank mum, which all know from The Anti-
quary, some from 'The Ryme of Sir Lancelot Bogle,"
and some again from the notice which Mr. Gladstone's
love of Scott (may it plead for him!) gave it once in
some Budget debate, I think. It is said to be brewed
of wheat, which is not in its favor (wheat was meant
to be eaten, not drunk) and very bitter, which is.
Nearly all bitter drinks are good. The only time I
ever drank ''spruce" beer I did not like it. The come-
liest of black malts is, of course, that noble Hquor
called of Guinness. Here at least I think England
cannot match Ireland, for our stouts are, as a rule, too
sweet and "clammy." But there used to be in the
country districts a sort of light porter which was one
of the most refreshing liquids conceivable for hot
weather. I have drunk it in Yorkshire at the foot of
Roseberry Topping, out of big stone bottles like cham-
pagne magnums. But that was nearly sixty years ago.
Genuine lager beer is no more to be boycotted than
genuine hock, though, by the way, the best that I ever
drank (it was at the good town of King's Lynn) was
Low not High Dutch in origin. It was so good that
I wrote to the shippers at Rotterdam to see if I could
get some sent to Leith, but the usual difficulties in
establishing connection between wholesale dealers and
individual buyers prevented this. It was, however,
something of a consolation to read the delightful name,

26o George Saintsbury

**our top-and-bottom-fermentation l>eer," in which the
manufacturer's letter, in very sound English for the
most part, spoke of it. English lager I must say I
have never liked; perhaps I have been unlucky in my
specimens. And good as Scotch strong beer is, I can-
not say that the lighter and medium kinds are very
good in Scotland. In fact, in Edinburgh I used to
import beer of this kind from Lincolnshire,^ where
there is no mistake about it. My own private opinion
is that John Barleycorn, north of Tweed, says: "I
am for whisky, and not for ale."

"Cider and perry,'^ says Burton, "are windy drinks" ;
yet he observes that the inhabitants of certain shires
in England (he does not, I am sorry to say, mention
Devon) of Normandy in France, and of Guipuzcoa in
Spain, "are no whit offended by them." I have never

^ It came from Alford, the chef-lieu, if it cannot be called the
capital, of the Tennyson country. I have pleasant associations
with the place, quite independent of the beery ones. And it
made me, partially at least, alter one of the ideas of my early
criticism — that time spent on a poet's local habitations was rather
wasted. I have always thought "The Dying Swan" one of its
author's greatest things, and one of the champion examples of
pure poetry in English literature. But I never fully heard the
"eddying song" that "flooded"

the creeping mosses and clambering weeds,
And the willow branches hoar and dank,
And the wavy swell of the soughing reeds.
And the wave-worn horns of the echoing bank,
And the silvery marish-flowers that throng
The desolate creeks and pools among —
till I saw them.

Beer and Cider 261

Jiked perry on the few occasions on which I have tasted
it; perhaps because its taste has always reminded me
of the smell of some stuff that my nurse used to put
on my hair when I was small. But I certainly have
been no whit offended by cider, either in divers Eng-
lish shires, including very specially those which Burton
does not include, Devon, Dorset, and Somerset, or in
Normandy. The Guipuzcoan variety I have, unfortu-
nately, had no opportunity of tasting. Besides, perry
seems to me to be an abuse of that excellent creature
the pear, whereas cider-apples furnish one of the most
cogent arguments to prove that Providence had the pro-
duction of alcoholic liquors directly in its eye. They
are good for nothing else whatever, and they are ex-
cellent good for that. I think I like the weak ciders,
such as those of the west and the Normandy, better
than the stronger ones,® and draught cider much better
than bottled. That of Norfolk, which has been much
commended of late, I have never tasted ; but I have had
both Western and West-Midland cider in my cellar,
often in bottle and once or twice in cask. It is a pity
that the liquor — extremely agreeable to the taste, one
of the most thirst-quenching to be anywhere found,
of no overpowering alcoholic strength as a rule, and
almost sovereign for gout — is not to be drunk without

« Herefordshire and Worcestershire cider can be very strong
and the perry, they say, still stroneer.

262 George Saintsbury

caution, and sometimes has to be given up altogether
from other medical aspects. Qualified with brandy —
a mixture which was first imparted to me at a road-
side inn by a very amiable Dorsetshire farmer whom
I met while walking from Sherborne to Blandford in
my first Oxford ''long" — it is capital : and cider-cup
who knoweth not? If there be any such, let him not
wait longer than to-morrow before establishing knowl-
edge. As for the pure juice of the apple, four gallons
a day per man used to be the harvest allowance in
Somerset when I was a boy. It is refreshing only to
think of it now.

Of mead or metheglin, the third indigenous liquor of
Southern Britain, I know little. Indeed, I should have
known nothing at all of it had it not been that the
parish-clerk and sexton of the Cambridgeshire village
where I lived, and the caretaker of a vinery which I
rented, was a bee-keeper and mead-maker. He gave me
some once. I did not care much for it. It was like a
sweet weak beer, with, of course, the special honey
flavor. But I should imagine that it was susceptible
of a great many different modes of preparation, and
it is obvious, considering what it is made of, that it
could be brewed of almost any strength. Old literary
notices generally speak of it as strong.

A FREE MAN'S WORSHIP
By Bertrand Russell

"A Free Man's Worship" was written in 1902; it was repub-
lished by Mr. Russell in 1918 in his volume Mysticism and Logic.
It is interesting to note carefully Mr. Russell's views in this
fine essay in connection with the fact that he was imprisoned by
the British Government as a pacifist during the War.

Much of Mr. Russell's writing, in mathematical and philo-
sophical fields, is above the head of the desultory reader; but so
stimulating a paper as this one should not be neglected by the
moderately inquisitive amateur,

Bertrand Russell was born in 1872, studied at Trinity College,
Cambridge, and is widely known as a thinker of uncompromising
liberalism.

To Dr. Faustus in his study Mephistopheles told the
histor}^ of the Creation, saying:

*'The endless praises of the choirs of angels had be-
gun to grow wearisome; for, after all, did he not de-
serve their praise ? Had he not given them endless joy ?
Would it not be more amusing to obtain undeserved
praise, to be worshiped by beings whom he tortured?
He smiled inwardly, and resolved that the great drama
should be performed.

"For countless ages the hot nebula whirled aimlessly
through space. At length it began to take shape, the
central mass threw off planets, the planets cooled, boil-
ing seas and burning mountains heaved and tossed,
from black masses of cloud hot sheets of rain deluged

263

264 Bertrand Russell

the barely solid crust. And now the first germ of life
grew in the depths of the ocean, and developed rapidly
in the fructifying warmth into vast forest trees, huge
ferns springing from the damp mould, sea monsters
breeding, fighting, devouring, and passing away. And
from the monsters, as the play unfolded itself, Man was
born, with the power of thought, the knowledge of
good and evil, and the cruel thirst for worship. And
Man saw that all is passing in this mad, monstrous
world, that all is struggling to snatch, at any cost, a
few brief moments of life before Death's inexorable
decree. And Man said : 'There is a hidden purpose,
could we but fathom it, and the purpose is good; for
we must reverence something, and in the visible world
there is nothing worthy of reverence.* And Man
stood aside from the struggle, resolving that God in-
tended harmony to come out of chaos by human efforts.
And when he followed the instincts which God had
transmitted to him from his ancestry of beasts of prey,
he called it Sin, and asked God to forgive him. But
he doubted whether he could be justly forgiven, until
he invented a divine Plan by which God's wrath was
to have been appeased. And seeing the present was
bad, he made it yet worse, that thereby the future might
be better. And he gave God thanks for the strength
that enabled him to forgo even the joys that were pos-
sible. And God smiled ; and when he saw that Mait

A Free Mans Worship 265

had become perfect in renunciation and worship, he
sent another sun through the sky, which crashed into
Man's sun; and all returned again to nebula.

" 'Yes,' he murmured, 'it was a good play; I will
have it performed again/ "

Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more
void of meaning, is the world which Science presents
for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our
ideals henceforward m.ust find a home. That Man is
the product of causes which had no prevision of the
end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth,
his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the
outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no
fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling,
can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that
all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the in-
spiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius,
are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar
system, and that the whole temple of Man's achieve-
ment must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of
a universe in ruins — all these things, if not quite beyond
dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy
which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within
the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm founda-
tion of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation
henceforth be safely built.

How, in such an alien and inhuman world, can so

266 Bertrand Russell

powerless a creature as Man preserve his aspirations
untarnished? A strange mystery it is that Nature,
omnipotent but bhnd, in the revolutions of her secular
hurryings through the abysses of space, has brought
forth at last a child, subject still to her power, but
gifted with sight, with knowledge of good and evil,
with the capacity of judging all the works of his un-
thinking Mother. In spite of Death, the mark and seal
of the parental control, Man is yet free, during his brief
years, to examine, to criticize, to know, and in imag-
ination to create. To him alone, in the world with
which he is acquainted, this freedom belongs; and in
this lies his superiority to the resistless forces that con-
trol his outward life.

The savage, like ourselves, feels the oppression of
his impotence before the powers of Nature; but having
in himself nothing that he respects more than Power,
he is willing to prostrate himself before his gods, with-
out inquiring whether they are worthy of his worship.
Pathetic and very terrible is the long history of cruelty
and torture, of degradation and human sacrifice, en-
dured in the hope of placating the jealous gods : surely,
the trembling believer thinks, when what is most pre-
cious has been freely given, their lust for blood must be
appeased, and more will not be required. The religion
of Moloch — as such creeds may be generically called
— is in essence the cringing submission of the slave,

A Free Mav!s Worship 267

who dare not, even in his heart, allow the thought that
his master deserves no adulation. Since the independ-
ence of ideals is not yet acknowledged, Power may be
freely worshiped, and receive an unlimited respect,
despite its wanton infliction of pain.

But gradually, as morality grows bolder, the claim
of the ideal world begins to be felt; and worship, if it
is not to cease, must be given to gods of another kind
than those created by the savage. Some, though they
feel the demands of the ideal, will still consciously re-
ject them, still urging that naked Power is worthy of
worship. Such is the attitude inculcated in God's
answer to Job out of the whirlwind : the divine power
and knowledge are paraded, but of the divine goodness
there is no hint. Such also is the attitude of those who,
in our own day, base their morality upon the struggle
for survival, maintaining that the survivors are neces-
sarily the fittest. But others, not content with an an-
swer so repugnant to the moral sense, will adopt the
position which we have become accustomed to regard
as specially religious, maintaining that, in some hidden
manner, the world of fact is really harmonious with
the world of ideals. Thus Man creates God, all-power-
ful and all-good, the mystic unity of what is and what
should be.

But the world of fact, after all, is not good; and,
in submitting our judgment to it, there is an element of

268 Bertrand Russell

slavishness from which our thoughts must be purged.
For in all things it is well to exalt the dignity of Man,
by freeing him as far as possible from the tyranny of
non-human Power, When we have realized that Power
is largely bad, that man, with his knowledge of good
and evil, is but a helpless atom in a world which has
no such knowledge, the choice is again presented to us :
Shall we worship Force, or shall we worship Good-
ness? Shall our God exist and be evil, or shall he be
recognized as the creation of our own conscience?

The answer to this question is very momentous, and
affects profoundly our whole morality. The worship
of Force, to which Carlyle and Nietzsche and the creed
of Militarism have accustomed us, is the result of
failure to maintain our own ideals against a hostile
universe : it is itself a prostrate submission to evil, a
sacrifice of our best to Moloch. If strength indeed is
to be respected, let us respect rather the strength of
those who refuse that false "recognition of facts"
which fails to recognize that facts are often bad. Let
us admit that, in the world we know there are many
things that would be better otherwise, and that the
ideals to which we do and must adhere are not realized
in the realm of matter. Let us preserve our respect
for truth, for beauty, for the ideal of perfection which
life does not permit us to attain, though none of these
things meet with the approval of the unconscious uni-

A Free Man's Worship 269

verse. If Power is bad, as it seems to be, let us reject
it from our hearts. In this lies Man's true freedom:
in determination to worship only the God created by
our own love of the good, to respect only the heaven
which inspires the insight of our best moments. In
action, in desire, we must submit perpetually to the
tyranny of outside forces ; but in thought, in aspiration,
we are free, free from our fellowmen, free from the
petty planet on which our bodies impotently crawl, free
even, while we live, from the tyranny of death. Let
us learn, then, that energy of faith which enables us
to live constantly in the vision of the good ; and let us
descend, in action, into the world of fact, with that
vision always before us.

When first the opposition of fact and ideal grows
fully visible, a spirit of fiery revolt, of fierce hatred of
the gods, seems necessary to the assertion of freedom.
To defy with Promethean constancy a hostile universe,
to keep its evil always in view, always actively hated,
to refuse no pain that the malice of Power can invent,
appears to be the duty of all who will not bow before
the inevitable. But indignation is still a bondage, for
it compels our thoughts to be occupied with an evil
world; and in the fierceness of desire from which re-
bellion springs there is a kind of self-assertion which
it is necessary for the wise to overcome. Indignation
is a submission of our thoughts, but not of our desires;

270 Bertrand Russell

the Stoic freedom in which wisdom consists is found
in the submission of our desires, but not of our
thoughts. From the submission of our desires springs
the virtue of resignation; from the freedom of our
thoughts springs the whole world of art and philos-
ophy, and the vision of beauty by which, at last, we
half reconquer the reluctant world. But the vision of
beauty is possible only to unfettered contemplation, to
thoughts not weighted by the load of eager wishes;
and thus Freedom comes only to those who no longer
ask of life that it shall yield them any of those per-
sonal goods that are subject to the mutations of Time.

Although the necessity of renunciation is evidence
of the existence of evil, yet Christianity, in preaching
it, has shown a wisdom exceeding that of the Prome-
thean philosophy of rebellion. It must be admitted
that, of the things we desire, some, though they prove
impossible, are yet real goods; others, however, as ar-
dently longed for, do not form part of a fully purified
ideal. The belief that what must be renounced is bad,
though sometimes false, is far less often false than
untamed passion supposes; and the creed of religion,
by providing a reason for proving that it is never false,
has been the means of purifying our hopes by the
discovery of many austere truths.

But there is in resignation a further good element:
even real goods, when they are unattainable, ought not

A Free Man's Worship 271

to be fretfully desired. To every man comes, sooner
or later, the great renunciation. For the young, there
is nothing unattainable ; a good thing desired with the
whole force of a passionate will, and yet impossible,
is to them not credible. Yet, by death, by illness, by
poverty, or by the voice of duty, we must learn, each
one of us, that the world was not made for us, and
that, however beautiful may be the things we crave
for, Fate may nevertheless forbid them. It is the part
of courage, when misfortune comes, to bear without
repining the ruin of our hopes, to turn away our
thoughts from vain regrets. This degree of submis-
sion to Power is not only just and right : it is the very
gate of wisdom.

But passive renunciation is not the whole wisdom;
for not by renunciation alone can we build a temple for
the worship of our own ideals. Haunting foreshadow-
ings of the temple appear in the realm of imagination,
in music, in architecture, in the untroubled kingdom of
reason, and in the golden sunset magic of lyrics, where
beauty shines and glows, remote from the touch of
sorrow, remote from the fear of change, remote from
the failures and disenchantments of the world of fact.
In the contemplation of these things the vision of
heaven will shape itself in our hearts, giving at once a
touchstone to judge the world about us, and an in-
spiration by which to fashion to our needs whatever

272 Bertrand Russell

is not incapable of serving as a stone in the sacred
temple.

Except for those rare spirits that are born without
sin, there is a cavern of darkness to be traversed before
that temple can be entered. The gate of the cavern
is despair, and its floor is paved with the gravestones
of abandoned hopes. There Self must die; there the
eagerness, the greed of untamed desire must be slain,
for only so can the soul be freed from the empire of
Fate. But out of the cavern the Gate of Renunciation
leads again to the daylight of wisdom, by whose rad-
iance a new insight, a new joy, a new tenderness, shine
forth to gladden the pilgrim's heart.

When, without the bitterness of impotent rebellion,
we have learnt both to resign ourselves to the outward
rule of Fate and to recognize that the non-human
world is unworthy of our worship, it becomes possible
at last so to transform and refashion the unconscious
universe, so to transmute it in the crucible of imagina-
tion, that a new image of shining gold replaces the old
idol of clay. In all the multiform facts of the world
— in the visual shapes of trees and mountains and
clouds, in the events of the life of man, even in the
very omnipotence of Death — the insight of creative
idealism can find the reflection of a beauty which its
own thoughts first made. In this way mind asserts
its subtle mastery over the thoughtless forces of Na-

A Free Mans Worship 273

ture. The more evil the material with which it deals,
the more thwarting to untrained desire, the greater
is its achievement in inducing the reluctant rock to
yield up its hidden treasures, the prouder its victory
in compelling the opposing forces to swell the pageant
of its triumph. Of all the arts, Tragedy is the proud-
est, the most triumphant ; for it builds its shining cit-
adel in the very center of the enemy's country, on the
very summit of his highest mountain; from its im-
pregnable watch-towers, his camps and arsenals, his
columns and forts, are all revealed; within its walls
the free life continues, while the legions of Death and
Pain and Despair, and all the servile captains of tyrant
Fate, afford the burghers of that dauntless city new
spectacles of beauty. Happy those sacred ramparts,
thrice happy the dwellers on that all-seeing eminence.
Honor to those brave warriors who, through countless
ages of warfare, have preserved for us the priceless
heritage of liberty, and have kept undefiled by sacrile-
gious invaders the home of the unsubdued.

But the beauty of Tragedy does but make visible a
quality which, in more or less obvious shapes, is pres-
ent always and everywhere in life. In the spectacle
of Death, in the endurance of intolerable pain, and in
the irrevocableness of a vanished past, there is a sacred-
ness, an overpowering awe, a feeling of the vastness,
the depth, the inexhaustible mystery of existence, in

274 Bertrand Russell

which, as by some strange marriage of pain, the suf-
ferer is bound to the world by bonds of sorrow. In
these moments of insight, we lose all eagerness of tem-
porary desire, all struggling and striving for petty
ends, all care for the little trivial things that, to a
superficial view, make up the common life of day by
day; we see, surrounding the narrow raft illumined
by the flickering light of human comradeship, the dark
ocean on whose rolling waves we toss for a brief
hour ; from the great night without, a chill blast breaks
in upon our refuge; all the loneliness of humanity amid
hostile forces is concentrated upon the individual soul,
which must struggle alone, with what of courage it can
command, against the whole weight of a universe that
cares nothing for its hopes and fears. Victory, in
this struggle with the powers of darkness, is the true
baptism into the glorious company of heroes, the true
initiation into the overmastering beauty of human
existence. From that awful encounter of the soul
with the outer world, renunciation, wisdom, and char-
ity are born; and with their birth a new life begins.
To take into the inmost shrine of the soul the irresist-
ible forces whose puppets we seem to be — Death and
change, the irrevocableness of the past, and the power-
lessness of man before the blind hurry of the universe
from vanity to vanity — to feel these things and know
them is to conquer them.

d Free Man's Worship 275

This is the reason why the Past has such magical
power. The beauty of its motionless and silent pic-
tures is like the enchanted purity of late autumn, when
the leaves, though one breath would make them fall,
still glow against the sky in golden glory. The Past
does not change or strive; like Duncan, after life's
fitful fever it sleeps well ; what was eager and grasping,
what was petty and transitory, has faded away, the
things that were beautiful and eternal shine out of it
like stars in the night. Its beauty, to a soul not worthy
of it, is unendurable; but to a soul which has con-
quered Fate it is the key of religion.

The life of Man, viewed outwardly, is but a small
thing in comparison with the forces of Nature. The
slave is doomed to worship Time and Fate and Death,
because they are greater than anything he finds in him-
self, and because all his thoughts are of things which
they devour. But, great as they are, to think of them
greatly, to feel their passionless splendor, is greater
still. And such thought makes us free men; we no
longer bow before the inevitable in Oriental subjection,
but we absorb it, and make it a part of ourselves. To
abandon the struggle for private happiness, to expel all
eagerness of temporary desire, to burn with passion for
eternal things — this is emancipation, and this is the
free man's worship. And this liberation is effected by
2 contemplation of Fate; for Fate itself is subdued by

276 Bertrand Russell

the mind which leaves nothing to be purged by the
purifying fire of Time.

United with his fellow-men by the strongest of all
ties, the tie of a common doom, the free man finds that
a new vision is with him always, shedding over every
daily task the light of love. The life of Man is a long
march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes,
tortured by weariness and pain, towards a goal that
few can hope to reach, and where none may tarry long.
One by one, as they march, our comrades vanish from
our sight, seized by the silent orders of omnipotent
Death. Very brief is the time in which we can help
them, in which their happiness or misery is decided.
Be it ours to shed sunshine on their path, to lighten
their sorrows by the balm of sympathy, to give them
the pure joy of a never-tiring affection, to strengthen
failing courage, to instil faith in hours of despair.
Let us not weigh in grudging scales their merits and
demerits, but let us think only of their need — of the
sorrows, the difficulties, perhaps the blindnesses, that
make the misery of their lives; let us remember that
they are fellow-sufferers in the same darkness, actors
in the same tragedy with ourselves. And so, when their
day is over, when their good and their evil have become
eternal by the immortality of the past, be it ours to
feel that, where they suffered, where they failed, no
deed of ours was the cause; but wherever a spark of

A Free Man's Worship 277

the divine fire kindled in their hearts, we were ready
with encouragement, with sympathy, with brave words
in which high courage glowed.

Brief and powerless is Man's life; on him and all his
race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind
to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent
matter rolls on its relentless way; for Man, condemned
to-day to lose his dearest, to-morrow himself to pass
through the gate of darkness, it remains only to cher-
ish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that en-
noble his little day ; disdaining the coward terrors of
the slave of Fate, to worship at the shrine that his own
hands have built; undismayed by the empire of chance,
to preserve a mind free from the wanton tyranny that
rules his outward life; proudly defiant of the irresist-
ible forces that tolerate, for a moment, his knowledge
and his condemnation, to sustain alone, a weary but
unyielding Atlas, the world that his own ideals have
fashioned despite the trampling march of unconscious
power.

SOME HISTORIANS
By Philip Guedalla

Philip Guedalla, born 1889, is a London barrister and at the
present time an Independent Liberal candidate for the House
of Commons. He has written excellent light verse and parodies,
and a textbook on European history, 1715-1815. His most con-
spicuous achievement so far is the brilliant volume Supers and
Supermen, from which my selection is taken.

Supers and Supermen is a collection of historical and political
portraits and skits. It is mercilessly and gloriously humorous.
Those who can always follow the wit and irony that Guedalla
knows how to conceal in a cunningly turned phrase, will find
the book a prodigious delight. He has an unerring eye for
the absurd; his paradoxes, when pondered, have a way of prov-
ing excellent truth. (Truth is sometimes like the furniture in
Through the Looking Glass, which could only be reached by
resolutely walking away from it.)

Ten years ago Mr. Guedalla was considered the most continu-
ously and insolently brilliant undergraduate of the Oxford of
that day. The charm and vigor of his ironical wit have not
lessened since his fellow-undergraduates strove to convince them-
selves that no man could be as clever as "P. G." seemed to be.
When Air. Guedalla "holds the mirror up to Nietzsche" or "gives
thanks that Britons never never will be Slavs," or dynasticizes
Henry James into three reigns : "James I, James II, and the Old
Pretender;" or when he speaks of "the cheerful clatter of Sir
James Barrie's cans as he went round with the milk of human
kindness," there will be some who will sigh; but there will also
(I hope) be many who will forgive the bravado for the quick-
silver wit.

It was Quintillian or Mr. Max Beerbohm who said,
^'History repeats itself: historians repeat each other.'*
The saying is full of the mellow wisdom of either
writer, and stamped w^ith the peculiar veracity of the
Silver Age of Roman or British epigram. One might
have added, if the aphorist had stayed for an answer,

278

Some Historians 279

that history is rather interesting when it repeats itself :
historians are not. In France, which is an enlightened
country enjoying the benefits of the Revolution and a
public examination in rhetoric, historians are expected
to write in a single and classical style of French. The
result is sometimes a rather irritating uniformity; it
is one long Taine that has no turning, and any quota-
tion may be attributed with safety to Guizot, because
la nuit tons les chats sont gris. But in England, which
is a free country, the restrictions natural to ignorant
(and immoral) foreigners are put off by the rough
island race, and history is written in a dialect which
is not curable by education, and cannot (it would
seem) be prevented by injunction.

Historians' English is not a style; it is an indus-
trial disease. The thing is probably scheduled in the
Workmen's Compensation Act, and the publisher may
be required upon notice of the attack to make a suit-
able payment to the writer's dependants. The work-
ers in this dangerous trade are required to adopt (like
Mahomet's coffin) a detached standpoint — that is, to
write as if they took no interest in the subject. Since
it is not considered good form for a graduate of less
than sixty years' standing to write upon any period that
is either familiar or interesting, this feeling is easily
acquired, and the resulting narrations present the dreary
impartiality of the Recording Angel without that com-

280 Philip Guedalla

pleteness which is the sole attraction of his style.
Wilde complained of Mr. Hall Caine that he wrote
at the top of his voice; but a modern historian, when
he is really detached, writes like some one talking in
the next room, and few writers have equaled the legal
precision of Coxe's observation that the Turks "sawed
the Archbishop and the Commandant in half, and
committed other grave violations of international
law/'

Having purged his mind of all unsteadying interest
in the subject, the young historian should adopt a
moral code of more than Malthusian severity, which
may be learned from any American writer of the last
century upon the Renaissance or the decadence of
Spain. This manner, which is especially necessary in
passages dealing with character, will lend to his work
the grave dignity that is requisite for translation into
Latin prose, that supreme test of an historian's style.
It will be his misfortune to meet upon the byways
of history the oddest and most abnormal persons, and
he should keep by him (unless he wishes to forfeit his
Fellowship) some convenient formula by which he
may indicate at once the enormity of the subject and
the disapproval of the writer. The writings of Lord
Macaulay will furnish him at need with the necessary
facility in lightning characterization. It was the prac-
tice of Cicero to label his contemporaries without dis-

r

Some Historians 281

tinctlon as "heavy men," and the characters of history
are easily divisible into ''far-seeing statesmen" and
''reckless libertines." It may be objected that al-
though it is sufficient for the purposes of contemporary
caricature to represent Mr. Gladstone as a collar or
Mr. Chamberlain as an eye-glass, it is an inadequate
record for posterity. But it is impossible for a busy
man to write history without formulae, and after all
sheep are sheep and goats are goats. Lord Macaulay
once wrote of some one, "In private life he was stern,
morose, and inexorable"; he was probably a Dutch-
man. It is a passage which has served as a lasting
model for the historian's treatment of character. I
had always imagined that Cliche was a suburb of Paris,
until I discovered it to be a street in Oxford. Thus,
if the working historian is faced with a period of "de-
plorable excesses," he handles it like a man, and writes
always as if he was illustrated with steel engravings:

The imbecile king now ripened rapidly towards
a crisis. Surrounded by a Court in which the
inanity of the day was rivaled only by the de-
bauchery of the night, he became incapable to-
wards the year 1472 of distinguishing good from
evil, a fact which contributed considerably to the
effectiveness of his foreign policy, but was hardly
calculated to conform with the monastic tradi-

282 Philip Guedalla

tions of his House. Long nights of drink and
dicing weakened a constitution that was already-
undermined, and the council-table, where once
Campo Santa had presided, was disfigured with
the despicable apparatus of Bagatelle. The
burghers of the capital were horrified by the wild
laughter of his madcap courtiers, and when it
w^as reported in London that Ladislas had played
at Halma the Court of St. James's received his
envoy in the deepest of ceremonial mourning.

That is precisely how it is done. The passage ex-
hibits the benign and contemporary influences of Lord
Macaulay and Mr. Bowdler, and it contains all the
necessary ingredients, except perhaps a ''venal Chan-
cellor" and a "greedy mistress." Vice is a subject of
especial interest to historians, who are in most cases
residents in small county towns; and there is un-
bounded truth in the rococo footnote of a writer on
the Renaissance, who said a propos of a Pope : ''The
disgusting details of his vices smack somewhat of the
morbid historian's lamp." The note itself is a fine
example of that concrete visualization of the subject
which led Macaulay to observe that in consequence of
Frederick's invasion of Silesia "black men fought on
the coast of Coromandel and red men scalped each
other by the Great Lakes of North America."

Some Historians 203

A less exciting branch of the historian's work is the
reproduction of contemporary sayings and speeches.
Thus, an obituary should always close on a note of
regretful quotation :

He lived in affluence and died in great pain
"Thus," it was said by the most eloquent of his
contemporaries, ''thus terminated a career as va-
ried as it was eventful, as strange as it was
unique."

But for the longer efforts of sustained eloquence
greater art is required. It is no longer usual, as in
Thucydides' day, to compose completely new speeches,
but it is permissible for the historian to heighten the
colors and even to insert those rhetorical questions
and complexes of personal pronouns which will render
the translation of the passage into Latin prose a work
of consuming interest and lasting profit:

The Duke assembled his companions for the
forlorn hope, and addressed them briefly in
oratio obliqua. "His father," he said, *'had al-
ways cherished in his heart the idea that he would
one day return to his own people. Had he fallen
in vain? Was it for nothing that they had dyed
with their loyal blood the soil of a hundred bat-
tlefields ? The past was dead, the future was yet

284 Philip Guedalla

to come. Let them remember that great sacrifices
were necessary for the attainment of great ends,
let them think of their homes and families, and
if they had any pity for an exile, an outcast, and
an orphan, let them die fighting."

That is the kind of passage that used to send the
blood of Dr. Bradley coursing more quickly through
his veins. The march of its eloquence, the solemnity
of its sentiment, and the rich balance of its pronouns
unite to make it a model for all historians : it can be
adapted for any period.

It is not possible in a short review to include the
special branches of the subject. Such are those effi-
cient modern text-books, in which events are referred
to either as ''factors" (as if they were a sum) or as
*'phases" (as if they were the moon). There is also
the solemn business of writing economic history, in
which the historian may lapse at will into algebra,
and anything not otherwise describable may be called
"social tissue." A special subject is constituted by the
early conquests of Southern and Central America; in
these there is a uniform opening for all passages run-
ning:

It was now the middle of October, and the
season was drawing to an end. Soon the moun-
tains would be whitened with the snows of winter

Some Historians 285

and every rivulet swollen to a roaring torrent.
Cortez, whose determination only increased with
misfortune, decided to delay his march until the
inclemency of the season abated. ... It was now
the middle of November, and the season was
drawing to an end. . . .

There is, finally, the method of military history.
This may be patriotic, technical, or in the manner
prophetically indicated by Virgil as Belloc, horrida
Belloc. The finest exponent of the patriotic style is
undoubtedly the Rev. W. H. Fitchett, a distinguished
colonial clergyman and historian of the Napoleonic
wars. His night-attacks are more nocturnal, and his
scaling parties are more heroically scaligerous than
those of any other writer. His drummer-boys are the
most moving in my limited circle of drummer-boys.
One gathers that the Peninsular War was full of pleas°
ing incidents of this type :

The Night Attack
It was midnight when Staff-Surgeon Pettigrew
showed the flare from the summit of Sombrero.
At once the whole plain was alive with the hum
of the great assault. The four columns speedily
got into position with flares and bugles at the
head of each. One made straight for the Water-

286 Philip Guedalla

gate, a second for the Bailey-guard, a third for
the Porter-house, and the last (led by the saintly
Smeathe) for the Tube station. Let us follow
the second column on its secret mission through
the night, lit by torches and cheered on by the

huzzas of a thousand English throats. ** the

s," cried Cocker in a voice hoarse with patri-
otism ; at that moment a red-hot shot hurtled over
the plain and, ricocheting treacherously from the
frozen river, dashed the heroic leader to the
ground. Captain Boffskin, of the Buffs, leapt up
with the dry coughing howl of the British in-
fantryman. " them," he roared, '' them

to " ; and for the last fifty yards it was neck

and neck with the ladders. Our gallant drummer-
boys laid to again, but suddenly a shot rang out
from the silent ramparts. The 94th Leger were
awake. We were discovered!

The war of 1870 requires more special treatment.
Its histories show no particular characteristic, but its
appearance in fiction deserves special attention. There
is a standard pattern.

How THE Prussians Came to Guitry-le-sec
It was a late afternoon in early September, or an
early afternoon in late September — I forget these

Some Historians 287

things — when I missed the boat express from
Kerplouarnec to Pouzy-le-roi and was forced by
the time-table to spend three hours at the for-
gotten hamlet of Guitry-le-sec, in the heart of
Dauphine. It contained besides a quantity of un-
derfed poultry one white church, one white mairie,
and nine white houses. An old man with a white
beard came towards me up the long white road.
**It was on just such an afternoon as this forty
years ago," he began, "that . . ."

"Stop!" I said sharply. "I have met you in a
previous existence. You are going to say that a
solitary Uhlan appeared sharply outlined against
the sky behind M. Jules* farm." He nodded
feebly.

"The red trousers had left the village half an
hour before to look for the hated Prussian in
the cafes of the neighboring town. You were
alone when the spiked helmets marched in. You
can hear their shrieking fifes to this day." He
wept quietly.

I went on. "There was an officer with them, a
proud, ugly man with a butter-colored mustache.
He saw the little Mimi and drove his coarse Sua-
bian hand upward through his Mecklenburger
mustache. You dropped on one knee. . . ."
But he had fled.

288 Philip Guedalla

In the first of the three cafes I saw a second
old man. ''Come in, Monsieur," he said. I
waited on the doorstep. "It was on just such an
afternoon. ..." I went on. At the other two
cafes two further old men attempted me with
the story; I told the last that he was rescued by
Zouaves, and walked happily to the station, to
read about Vichy Celestins until the train came
in from the south.

The Russo-Japanese War is a more original subject
and derives its particular flavor from the airy grace
with which Sir Ian Hamilton has described it. Like
this:

Wao-wao, Jan. 31. — The rafale was purring
like a mistral as I shaved this morning. I wonder

where it is; must ask — — . is a charming

fellow with the face of a Baluchi Kashgai and a
voice like a circular saw.

1 1 :40 — It was eleven-forty when I looked at
my watch. The shrapnel-bursts look like a plan-
tation of powder-puflFs suspended in the sky.
Victor says there is a battle going on : capital chap
Victor.

2 p. M. — Lunched with an American lady-doc-
tor. How feminine the Americans can be.

Some Historians 289

7 p. M. — A great day. It was Donkelsdorp over
again. Substitute the Tenth Army for the Traf-
fordshire's baggage wagon, swell Honks Spruit
into the roaring Wang-ho, elevate Oom Kop into
the frowning scarp of Pyjiyama, and you have it.
The Staff were obviously gratified when I told
them about Donkelsdorp.

The Rooskis came over the crest-line in a huddle
of massed battalions, and Gazeka was after them
like a rat after a terrier. I knew that his horse-
guns had no horses (a rule of the Japanese service
to discourage unnecessary changing of ground),
but his men bit the trails and dragged them up by
their teeth. Slowly the Muscovites peeled off the
steaming mountain and took the funicular down
the other side.

I wonder what my friend Smuts would make
of the Yen-tai coal mine? Well, well. — "Some-
thing accomplished, something done.**

The technical manner is more difficult of acquisition
for the beginner, since it involves a knowledge of at
least two European languages. It is cardinal rule
that all places should be described as points d'appui,
the simple process of scouting looks far better as
VerschJeierung, and the adjective "strategical" may be
used without any meaning in front of any noun.

290 Philip Guedalla

But the military manner was revolutionized by the
war. Mr. Belloc created a new Land and a new
Water. We know now why the Persian commanders
demanded "earth and water" on their entrance into a
Greek town; it was the weekly demand of the Great
General Staff, as it called for its favorite paper. Mr.
Belloc has woven Baedeker and geometry into a new
style : it is the last cry of historians' English, because
one was invented by a German and the other by a
Greek.

WINTER MIST
By Robert Palfrey Utter

Robert Palfrey Utter was born in 1875, in Olympia, Wash-
ington. He graduated from Harvard (I am sorry there are so
many Harvard men in this book: I didn't know they were Har-
vard men until too late) in 1898 and took his Ph.D. there in
1906. After a varied experience, including editorial work on
the Youth's^ Companion, reporting on the New York Evening
Post, ranching in Mexico and graduate study at Harvard, he
went to Amherst, 1906-18, as associate professor of English. He
was on the faculty of the A. E. F. University at Beaune, France,
1919; and in 1920 became associate professor of English at the
University of California.

Mr. Utter has contributed largely to the magazines, and has
published Guide to Good English (1914), Every-Day Words and
Their Uses (1916), and Every-Day Pronunciation (1918).

Former students of his at Amherst have told me of the last-
ing stimulus his teaching has given them : that he can beautifully
practise what he preaches of the art of writing, this essay shows.

From a magazine with a rather cynical cover I
learned very recently that for pond skating the proper
costume is brown homespun with a fur collar on the
jacket, whereas for private rinks one wears a gray
herringbone suit and taupe-colored alpine. Oh, bar-
ren years that I have been a skater, and no one told
me of this ! And here's another thing. I was patiently
trying to acquire a counter turn under the idle gaze
of a hockey player who had no better business till the
others arrived than to watch my efforts. "What I
don't see about that game," he said at last, "is who

291

292 Robert Palfrey Utter

wins ?" It had never occurred to me to ask. He looked
bored, and I remembered that the pictures in the mag-
azine showed the wearers of the careful costumes for
rink and pond skating as having rather blank eyes
that looked inimitably bored. I have hopes of the
"rocker" and the **mohawk" ; I might acquire a proper
costume for skating on a small river if I could learn
what it is; but a bored look — why, even hockey does
not bore me, unless I stop to watch it. I don't wonder
that those who play it look bored. Even Alexander,
who played a more imaginative game than hockey,
was bored — poor fellow, he should have taken up fancy
skating in his youth ; I never heard of a human being
who pretended to a complete conquest of it.

I like pond skating best by moonlight. The hollow
among the hills will always have a bit of mist about
it, let the sky be clear as it may. The moonlight, which
seems so lucid and brilliant when you look up, is all
pearl and smoke round the pond and the hills. The
shore that was like iron under your heel as you came
down to the ice is vague, when you look back at it from
the center of the pond, as the memory of a dream.
The motion is like flying in a dream ; you float free
and the world floats under you ; your velocity is with-
out effort and without accomplishment, for, speed as
you may, you leave nothing behind and approach noth-
ing. You look upward. The mist is overhead now;

Winter Mist 293

you see the moon in a ''hollow halo" at the bottom of
an ''icy crystal cup," and you yourself are in just such
another. The mist, palely opalescent, drives past her
out of nothing into nowhere. Like yourself, she is the
center of a circle of vague limit and vaguer content,
where passes a swift, ceaseless stream of impres-
sion through a faindy luminous halo of conscious-

ness.

If by moonlight the mist plays upon the emotions
like faint, bewitching music, in sunlight it is scarcely
less. More often than not when I go for my skating
to our cosy little river, a winding mile from the mill-
dam to the railroad tresde, the hills are clothed in
silver mist which frames them in vignettes with blurred
edges. The tone is that of Japanese paintings on white
silk, their color showing soft and dull through the
frost-powder with which the air is filled. At the mill-
dam the hockey players furiously rage together, but
I heed them not, and in a moment am beyond the first
bend, where their clamor comes softened on the air
like that of a distant convention of politic crows. The
silver powder has fallen on the ice, just enough to
cover earlier tracings and leave me a fresh plate to
etch with grapevines and arabesques. The stream
winds ahead like an unbroken road, striped across
with soft-edged shadows of violet, indigo, and
lavender. On one side it is bordered with leaning

294 Robert Palfrey Utter

birch, oak, maple, hickory, and occasional groups of
hemlocks under which the very air seems tinged with
green. On the other, rounded masses of scrub oak
and alder roll back from the edge of the ice like
clouds of reddish smoke. The river narrows and turns,
then spreads into a swamp, where I weave my curves
round the straw-colored tussocks. Here, new as the
snow is, there are earlier tracks than mine. A crow
has traced his parallel hieroglyph, alternate footprints
with long dashes where he trailed his middle toe as he
lifted his foot and his spur as he brought it down.
Under a low shrub that has hospitably scattered its
seed is a dainty, close-wrought embroidery of tiny bird
feet in irregular curves woven into a circular pattern.
A silent glide towards the bank, where among bare
twigs little forms flit and swing with low conversa-
tional notes, brings me in company with a working
crew of pine siskins, methodically rifling seed cones
of birch and alder, chattering sotto voce the while.
Under a leaning hemlock the writing on the snow
tells of a squirrel that dropped from the lowest branch,
hopped aimlessly about for a few yards, then went
up the bank. Farther on, where the river narrows
again, a flutter-headed rabbit crossing at top speed
has made a line seemingly as free from frivolous in-
direction as if it had been defined by all the ponder-
osities of mathematics. There is no pursuing track;

Winter Mist 295

was It his own shadow he fled, or the shadow of
hawk ?

The mist now lies along the base of the hills, leav-
ing the upper ridges almost imperceptibly veiled and
the rounded tops faintly softened. The snowy slopes
are etched with brush and trees so fine and soft that
they remind me of Diirer's engravings, the fur of
Saint Jerome's lion, the cock's feathers in the coat of
arms with the skull. From behind the veil of the
southernmost hill comes a faint note as

From undiscoverable lips that blow
An immaterial horn.

It is the first far premonition of the noon train; I
pause and watch long for the next sign. At last I
hear its throbbing, which ceases as it pauses at the
flag station under the hill. There the invisible loco-
motive shoots a column of silver vapor above the sur-
face of the mist, breaking in rounded clouds at the
top, looking like nothing so much as the photograph
of the explosion of a submarine mine, a titanic out-
burst of force in static pose, a geyser of atomized
water standing like a frosted elm tree. Then quick
pufl^s of dusky smoke, the volley of which does not
reach my ear till the train has stuck its black head out
of fairyland and become a prosaic reminder of dinner.

296 Robert Palfrey Utter

High on its narrow trestle it leaps across my little
river and disappears between the sandbanks. Far
behind it the mist is again spreading into its even
layers. Silence is renewed, and I can hear the musical
creaking of four starlings in an apple tree as they
eviscerate a few rotten apples on the upper branches.
I turn and spin down the curves and reaches of the
fiver without delaying for embroideries or arabesques.
At the mill-dam the hockey game still rages; the players
take no heed of the noon train.

Let Zal and Rustum bluster as they will,
Or Hatim call to supper . . .

Their minds and eyes are intent on a battered disk of
hard rubber. I begin to think I have misjudged them
when I consider what effort of imagination must be
involved in the concentration of the faculties on such
an object, transcending the call of hunger and the lure
of beauty. Is it to them as is to the mystic "the great
syllable Om" whereby he attains Nirvana? I cannot
attain it; I can but wonder what the hockey players
win one-half so precious as the stuff they miss.

TRIVIA
By Logan Pearsall Smith

It would be extravagant to claim that Pearsall Smith's Trivia,
the remarkable little book from which these miniature essays
are extracted, is well known : it is too daintily, fragile and absurd
and sophisticated to appeal to a very large public. But it has
a cohort of its own devotees and fanatics, and since its publi-
cation in igi7 it has become a sort of password in a secret
brotherhood or intellectual Suicide Club. I say suicide advisedly,
for Mr. Smith's irony is glitteringly edged. Its incision is so
keen that the reader is often unaware the razor edge has turned
against himself until he perceives the wound to be fatal.

Pearsall Smith was, in a way, one of the Men of the Nineties.
But he had Repressions — (an excellent thing to have, brothers.
Most of the great literature is founded on judicious repres-
sions). He cam.e of an excellent old intellectual Quaker family
down in the Philadelphia region. His father (if we remember
rightly) was one of Walt Whitman's staunchest friends in the
Camden days. But when the strong wine of the Nineties was
foaming in the vats and noggins, Mr. Smith (so we imagine
it, at least) was still too close to that "guarded education in
morals and manners" that he had had at Haverford College,
Pennsylvania (and further tinctured with docility at Harvard
and Balliol) to give full rein to his inward gush of hilarious
satirics. Like a Strong Silent Man he held in that wellspring
of champagne and mercury until many many years later. When
it came out (in 1902 he first began to print his Trivia, privately;
the book was published by Doubleday in IQ17) it sparkled all
the more tenderly for its long cellarage.

But we must be statistical. Logan Pearsall Smith was born at
Melville, N. J., in 1865. As a boy he lived in Philadelphia and
Germantown (do you know Germantown? it is a foothill of
that mountain range whereof Parnassus and Olivet are twin
peaks) and was three years at Haverford in the class of '85.
He went to Harvard for a year, then to Balliol College, Oxford,
where he took his degree in 1893. Ever since then, eheu, he
has lived in England.

Stonehenge
They sit there for ever on the dim horizon of my
mind, that Stonehenge circle of elderly disapproving

207

298 Logan Pearsall Smith

Faces — Faces of the Uncles and Schoolmasters and
Tutors who frowned on my youth.

In the bright center and sunlight I leap, I caper,
I dance my dance ; but when I look up, I see they are
not deceived. For nothing ever placates them, noth-
ing ever moves to a look of approval that ring of bleak,
old, contemptuous Faces.

The Stars

Battling my way homeward one dark night against
the wind and rain, a sudden gust, stronger than the
others, drove me back into the shelter of a tree. But
soon the Western sky broke open ; the illumination of
the Stars poured down from behind the dispersing
clouds.

I was astonished at their brightness, to see how they
filled the night with their soft lustre. So I went my
way accompanied by them ; Arcturus followed me, and
becoming entangled in a leafy tree, shone by glimpses,
and then emerged triumphant. Lord of the Western
Sky. Moving along the road in the silence of my own
footsteps, my thoughts were among the Constellations.
I was one of the Princes of the starry Universe; in
me also there was something that was not insignificant
and mean and of no account.

Trivia 299

The Spider

What shall I compare it to, this fantastic thing I
call my Mind? To a waste-paper basket, to a sieve
choked with sediment, or to a barrel full of floating
froth and refuse?

No, what it is really most like is a spider's web,
insecurely hung on leaves and twigs, quivering in
every wind, and sprinkled with dewdrops and dead
flies. And at its center, pondering for ever the Prob-
lem of Existence, sits motionless the spider-like aiid
uncanny Soul.

L'OiSEAU Bleu

What is It, I have more than once asked myself,
what is it that I am looking for in my walks about
London? Sometimes it seems to me as if I were fol-
lowing a Bird, a bright Bird that sings sweetly as it
floats about from one place to another.

When I find myself, however, among persons of
middle age and settled principles, see them moving
regularly to their offices — what keeps them going? I
ask myself. And I feel ashamed of myself and my
Bird.

There is though a Philosophic Doctrine — I studied
it at College, and I know that many serious people

300 Logan Pearsall Smith

believe it — which maintains that all men, in spite of
appearances and pretensions, all live alike for Pleas-
ure. This theory certainly brings portly, respected
persons very near to me. Indeed, with a sense of low
complicity, I have sometimes watched a Bishop. Was
he, too, on the hunt for Pleasure, solemnly pursuing
his Bird?

I See The World

"But you go nowhere, see nothing of the world,"
my cousins said.

Now though I do go sometimes to the parties to
which I am now and then invited, I find, as a matter
of fact, that I get really much more pleasure by look-
ing in at windows, and have a way of my own of
seeing the World. And of summer evenings, when
motors hurry through the late twilight, and the great
houses take on airs of inscrutable expectation, I go
owling out through the dusk; and wandering toward
the West, lose my way in unknown streets — an un-
known City of revels. And when a door opens and a
bediamonded Lady moves to her motor over carpets un-
rolled by powdered footmen, I can easily think her
some great Courtezan, or some half-believed Duchess,
hurrying to card-tables and lit candles and strange
scenes of joy. I like to see that there are still splendid
people on this flat earth; and at dances, standing in

Trivia 30 1

the street with the crowd, and stirred by the music,
the lights, the rushing sound of voices, I think the
Ladies as beautiful as Stars who move up those lanes
of light past our rows of vagabond faces; the young
men look like Lords in novels; and if (it has once or
twice happened) people I know go by me, they strike
me as changed and rapt beyond my sphere. And when
on hot nights windows are left open, and I can look
in at Dinner Parties, as I peer through lace curtains
and window-flowers at the silver, the women's shoul-
ders, the shimmer of their jewels, and the divine atti-
tudes of their heads as they lean and listen, I imagine
extraordinary intrigues and unheard-of wines and pas-
sions.

The Church of England

I have my Anglican moments; and as I sat there
that Sunday afternoon, in the Palladian interior of the
London Church, and listened to the unexpressive voices
chanting the correct service, I felt a comfortable as-
surance that we were in no danger of being betrayed
into any unseemly manifestations of religious fervor.
We had not gathered together at that performance to
abase ourselves with furious hosannas before any dark
Creator of an untamed Universe, no Deity of freaks
and miracles and sinister hocus-pocus ; but to pay our
duty to a highly respected Anglican First Cause — un-

302 Logan Pearsall Smith

demonstrative, gentlemanly, and conscientious — whom,
without loss of self-respect, we could decorously praise.

Consolation

The other day, depressed on the Underground, I
tried to cheer myself by thinking over the joys of our
human lot. But there wasn't one of them for which
I seemed to care a button — not Wine, nor Friendship,
nor Eating, nor Making Love, nor the Consciousness
of Virtue. Was it worth while then going up in a
lift into a world that had nothing less trite to offer?

Then I thought of reading — the nice and subtle
happiness of reading. This was enough, this joy not
dulled by Age, this polite and unpunished vice, this
selfish, serene, life-long intoxication.

The Kaleidoscope

I find in my mind, in its miscellany of ideas and
musings, a curious collection of little landscapes and
pictures, shining and fading for no reason. Sometimes
they are views in no way remarkable — the corner of
a road, a heap of stones, an old gate. But there are
many charming pictures too: as I read, between my
eyes and book, the Moon sheds down on harvest fields
her chill of silver; I see autumnal avenues, with the
leaves falling, or swept in heaps; and storms blow
among my thoughts, with the rain beating for ever on

Trivia 303

the fields. Then Winter's upward glare of snow ap-
pears; or the pink and delicate green of Spring in the
windy sunshine; or cornfields and green waters, and
youths bathing in Summer's golden heats.

And as I walk about, certain places haunt me; a
cathedral rises above a dark blue foreign town, the
color of ivory in the sunset light; now I find myself
in a French garden, full of lilacs and bees, and shut-in
sunshine, with the Mediterranean lounging and wash-
ing outside its walls ; now in a little college library, with
busts, and the green reflected light of Oxford lawns —
and again I hear the bells, reminding me of the familiar
Oxford hours.

The Poplar

There is a great tree in Sussex, whose cloud of thin
foliage floats high in the summer air. The thrush
sings in it, and blackbirds, who fill the late, decorative
sunshine with a shimmer of golden sound. There the
nightingale finds her green cloister; and on those
branches sometimes, like a great fruit, hangs the lemon-
colored Moon. In the glare of August, when all the
world is faint with heat, there is always a breeze
in those cool recesses, always a noise, like the noise of
water, among its lightly-hung leaves.

But the owner of this Tree lives in London, reading
books.

BEYOND LIFE
By James Branch Cabell

To my taste, Beyond Life, an all-night soliloquy put into the
mouth of the author's alter ego Charteris, is the most satisfying
of Air. Cabell's books. Its point of view is deftly sharpened, its
manner is urbane and charming, without posture or allegorical
pseudo-romantics. From this book I have taken the two closing
sections, which form a beautiful and significant whole.

James Branch Cabell, born in Richm.ond, Virginia, in 1879,
graduated from William and Mary College in 1898. He had
some newspaper experience in Richmond and on the New York
Herald, and began publishing in 1904. Not until 1915, until Mr.
McBride, the New York publisher, and his untiring literary
assistant, Mr. Guy Holt (to whom much of Cabell's apprecia-
tion is due), began their work, did critics begin to take him at all
seriously. Since that time Mr. Cabell's reputation has been enor-
mously enhanced by the idiotic suppression of his novel Jurgen.
The Cabell cult has been almost too active in zeal, but there can
be no doubt of his very real and refreshing imaginative talent.

I ASK of literature precisely those things of which I
feel the lack in my own life. I appeal for charity, and
implora that literature afford me what I cannot come
by in myself. . . .

For I want distinction for that existence which ought
to be peculiarly mine, among my innumerable fellows
who swarm about earth like ants. Yet which one of
us is noticeably, or can be appreciably different, in this
throng of human ephemerae and all their millions and
inestimable millions of millions of predecessors and
oncoming progeny? And even though one mote may
transiently appear exceptional, the distinction of those

304

Beyond Life 305

who in their heydays are "great" personages—much
as the Emperor of Lilliput overtopped his subjects by
the breadth of Captain GulHver's nail — must suffer
loss with time, and must dwindle continuously, until
at most the man's recorded name remains here and
there in sundry pedants' libraries. There were how
many dynasties of Pharaohs, each one of whom was
absolute lord of the known world, and is to-day for-
gotten ? Among the countless popes who one by one
were adored as the regent of Heaven upon earth, how
many persons can to-day distinguish? and does not
time breed emperors and czars and presidents as plenti-
ful as blackberries, and as little thought of when their
season is out? For there is no perpetuity in human
endeavor : we strut upon a quicksand : and all that any
man may do for good or ill is presently forgotten,
because it does not matter. I wail to a familiar tune,
of course, in this lament for the evanescence of human
grandeur and the perishable renown of kings. And
indeed to the statement that imperial C^sar is turned
io clay and Mizraim now cures wounds, and that in
short Queen Anne is dead, we may agree lightly
enough; for it is, after all, a matter of no personal
concern : but how hard it is to concede that the banker
and the rector and the traffic-officer, to whom we more
immediately defer, and we ourselves, and the little gold
heads of our children, may be of no importance, either/

3o6 James Branch Cabell

... In art it may so happen that the thing which a
man makes endures to be misunderstood and gabbled
over: yet it is not the man himself. We retain the
Iliad, but oblivion has swallowed Homer so deep that
many question if he ever existed at all. ... So we
pass as a cloud of gnats, where I want to live and be
thought of, if only by myself, as a distinguishable
entity. And such distinction is impossible in the long
progress of suns, whereby in thought to separate the
personality of any one man from all others that have
lived, becomes a task to stagger Omniscience. . . .
I want my life, the only life of which I am assured,
to have symmetry or, in default of that, at least to
acquire some clarity. Surely it is not asking very
much to wish that my personal conduct be intelligible
to me ! Yet it is forbidden to know for what purpose
this universe was intended, to what end it was set
a-going, or why I am here, or even what I had prefer-
ably do while here. It vaguely seems to me that I
am expected to perform an allotted task, but as to what
it is I have no notion. . . . And indeed, what have I
done hitherto, in the years behind me? There are some
books to show as increment, as something which w^as
not anywhere before I made it, and which even in bulk
will replace my buried body, so that my life will be to
mankind no loss materially. But the course of my life,
when I look back, is as orderless as a trickle of water

Beyond Life 307

that is diverted and guided by every pebble and crevice
and grass-root it encounters. I seem to have done
nothing with pre-meditation, but rather, to have had
things done to me. And for all the rest of my life,
as I knov^ nov^, I shall have to shave every morning in
order to be ready for no more than this ! . . . I have
attempted to make the best of my material circum-
stances always; nor do I see to-day how any widely
varying course could have been wiser or even feasible :
but material things have nothing to do with that life
which moves in me. Why, then, should they direct
and heighten and provoke and curb every action of
life? It is against the tyranny of matter I would rebel
— against life's absolute need of food, and books, and
fire, and clothing, and flesh, to touch and to inhabit,
lest life perish. . . . No, all that which I do here or
refrain from doing lacks clarity, nor can I detect any
symmetry anywhere, such as living would assuredly
display, I think, if my progress were directed by any
particular motive. . . . It is all a muddling through,
somehow, without any recognizable goal in view, and
there is no explanation of the scuffle tendered or any-
where procurable. It merely seems that to go on living
has become with me a habit. . . .

And I want beauty in my life. I have seen beauty
in a sunset and in the spring woods and in the eyes of
divers women, but now these happy accidents of light

3o8 James Branch Cabell

and color no longer thrill me. And I want beauty in
my life itself, rather than in such chances as befall it.
It seems to me that many actions of my life were beau-
tiful, very long ago, when I was young in an evanished
world of friendly girls, who were all more lovely than
any girl is nowadays. For women now are merely
more or less good-looking, and as I know, their looks
when at their best have been painstakingly enhanced
and edited. . . . But I v/ould like this life which moves
and yearns in me, to be able itself to attain to comeli-
ness, though but in transitory performance. The life
of a butterfly, for example, is just a graceful gesture :
and yet, in that its loveliness is complete and perfectly
rounded in itself, I envy this bright flicker through
existence. And the nearest I can come to my ideal is
punctiliously to pay my bills, be polite to my wife, and
contribute to deserving charities : and the program does
not seem, somehow, quite adequate. There are my
books, I know; and there is beauty "embalmed an(^
treasured up" in many pages of my books, and in the
books of other persons, too, which T may read at will :
but this desire inborn in me is not to be satiated by
making marks upon paper, nor by deciphering them.
... In short, T am enamored of that flawless beauty
of which all poets have p'^rturbedly divined the exist-
ence somewhere, and which life as men know it simply
does not afford nor anywhere foresee. . . .

Beyond Life 309

And tenderness, too — but does that appear a
mawkish thing to desiderate in life? Well, to my
finding human beings do not like one another. Indeed,
why should they, being rational creatures? All babies
have a temporary lien on tenderness, of course: and
therefrom children too receive a dwindHng income,
although on looking back, you will recollect that your
childhood was upon the whole a lonesome and much
put-upon period. But all grown persons ineffably dis-
trust one another. ... In courtship, I grant you, there
is a passing aberration which often mimics tenderness,
sometimes as the result of honest delusion, but more
frequently as an ambuscade in the endless struggle
between man and woman. Married people are not ever
tender with each other, you will notice: if they are
mutually civil it is much : and physical contacts apart,
their relation is that of a very moderate intimacy. My
own wife, at all events, I find an unfailing mystery,
a Sphinx whose secrets T assume to be not worth
knowing! and, as I am mildly thankful to narrate, she
knows very little about me, and evinces as to my affairs
no morbid interest. That is not to assert that if I
were ill she would not nurse me through any imaginable
contagion, nor that if she were drowning I would not
plunge in after her, whatever my delinquencies at
swimming: what T mean is that, pending such high
crises, we tolerate each other amicably, and never

jio James Branch Cabell

think of doing more. . . . And from our blood-kin
we grow apart inevitably. Their lives and their in-
terests are no longer the same as ours, and when we
meet it is with conscious reservations and much manu-
factured talk. Besides, they know things about us
which we resent. . . . And with the rest of my fellows,
I find that convention orders all our dealings, even
with children, and we do and say what seems more or
less expected. And I know that we distrust one an-
other all the while, and instinctively conceal or misrep-
resent our actual thoughts and emotions when there is
no very apparent need. . . . Personally, I do not like
human beings because I am not aware, upon the whole,
of any generally distributed qualities which entitle
them as a race to admiration and affection. But to-
ward people in books — such as Mrs. Millamant, and
Helen of Troy, and Bella Wilfer, and Melusine, and
Beatrix Esmond — I may intelligently overflow with
tenderness and caressing words, in part because they
deserve it, and in part because I know they will not
suspect me of being ''queer" or of having ulterior
motives. . . .

And I very often wish that I could know the truth
about just any one circumstance connected with my
life. ... Is the phantasmagoria of sound and noise
and color really passing or is it all an ilkision here in
my brain ? How do you know that you are not dream-

Beyond Life 311

ing me, for instance ? In your conceded dreams, I ant
sure, you must invent and see and listen to persons
who for the while seem quite as real to you as I do
now. As I do, you observe, I say ! and what thing is
it to which I so glibly refer as I? If you will try to
form a notion of yourself, of the sort of a something
that you suspect to inhabit and partially to control
your flesh and blood body, you will encounter a walk-
ing bundle of superfluities : and when you mentally
have put aside the extraneous things — your garments
and your members and your body, and your acquired
habits and your appetites and your inherited traits and
your prejudices, and all other appurtenances which
considered separately you recognize to be no integral
part of you, — there seems to remain in those pearl-
colored brain-cells, wherein is your ultimate lair, very
little save a faculty for receiving sensations, of which
you know the larger portion to be illusory. And
surely, to be just a very gullible consciousness provi-
sionally existing among inexplicable mysteries, is not
an enviable plight. And ye' this life — to which I cling
tenaciously— comes to no more. Meanwhile I hear
men talk about "the truth"; and they even wager
handsome sums upon their knowledge of it : but I align
myself with ''jesting Pilate,'* and echo the forlorn
query that recorded time has left unanswered. . . .
Then, last of all, I desiderate urbanity. I believe

312 James Branch Cabell

this is the rarest quality in the world. Indeed, it prob-
ably does not exist anywhere. A really urbane per-
son— a mortal open-minded and affable to conviction
of his own shortcomings and errors, and unguided in
anything by irrational blind prejudices — could not but
in a world of men and women be regarded as a
monster. We are all of us, as if by instinct, intoler-
ant of that which is unfamiliar: we resent its impu-
dence : and very much the same principle which prompts
small boys to jeer at a straw-hat out of season induces
their elders to send missionaries to the heathen. The
history of the progress of the human race is but the
picaresque romance of intolerance, a narrative of how
— what is it Milton says ? — "truth never came into the
world but, like a bastard, to the ignominy of him that
brought her forth, till time hath washed and salted the
infant, declared her legitimate, and churched the father
of his young Minerva." And I, who prattle to you, very
candidly confess that I have no patience with other peo-
ple's ideas unless they coincide with mine : for if the
fellow be demonstrably wrong I am fretted by his
stupidity, and if his notion seem more nearly right than
mine I am infuriated. . . . Yet I wish I could acquire ur-
banity, very much as I would like to have wings. For
in default of it, I cannot even manage to be civil to
that piteous thing called human nature, or to view its
parasites, whether they be politicians or clergymen or

Beyond Life 313

popular authors, with one-half the commiseration
which the shifts they are put to, quite certainly, would
rouse in the urbane. . . .

So I in point of fact desire of literature, just as you
guessed, precisely those things of which I most poig-
nantly and most constantly feel the lack in my own
life. And it is that which romance affords her postu-
lants. The philtres of romance are brewed to free
us from this unsatisfying life that is calendared
by fiscal years, and to contrive a less disastrous
elusion of our own personalities than many seek
dispersedly in drink and drugs and lust and fana-
ticism, and sometimes in death. For, beset by his
own rationality, the normal man is goaded to evade
the strictures of his normal life, upon the incontestable
ground that it is a stupid and unlovely routine ; and to
escape likewise from his own personality, which bores
him quite as much as it does his associates. So he
hurtles into these very various roads from reality, pre-
cisely as a goaded sheep flees without notice of what
lies ahead. . . .

And romance tricks him, but not to his harm. For,
be it remembered that man alone of animals plays the
ape to his dreams. Romance it is undoubtedly who
whispers to every man that life is not a blind and aim-
less business, not all a hopeless waste and confusion*
and that his existence is a pageant (appreciatively ob-

314 James Branch Cabell

served by divine spectators), and that he is strong
and excellent and wise : and to romance he listens, will-
ing and thrice willing to be cheated by the honeyed
fiction. The things of which romance assures him are
very far from true : yet it is solely by believing himself
a creature but little lower than the cherubim that man
has by interminable small degrees become, upon the
whole, distinctly superior to the chimpanzee : so that,
however extravagant may seem these flattering whis-
pers to-day, they w^ere immeasurably more remote
from veracity when men first began to listen to their
sugared susurrus, and steadily the discrepancy lessens.
To-day these things seem quite as preposterous to calm
consideration as did flying yesterday: and so, to the
Gradgrindians, romance appears to discourse foolishly,
and incurs the common fate of prophets : for it is about
to-morrow and about the day after to-morrow, that
romance is talking, by means of parables. And all
the while man plays the ape to fairer and yet fairer
dreams, and practice strengthens him at mimickry. . . .
To what does the whole business tend? — why, how
in heaven's name should I know ? We can but be con-
tent to note that all goes forward, toward something.
... It may be that we are nocturnal creatures per-
turbed by rumors of a dawn which comes inevitably,
as prologue to a day wherein we and our children have
no part whatever. It may be that when our arboreal

Beyond Life 315

propositus descended from his palm-tree and began to
walk upright about the earth, his progeny were forth-
with committed to a journey in which to-day is only a
way-station. Yet I prefer to take it that we are com-
ponents of an unfinished world, and that we are but
as seething atoms which ferment toward its making,
if merely because man as he now exists can hardly
be the finished product of any Creator whom one could
very heartily revere. We are being made into some-
thing quite unpredictable, I imagine : and through the
purging and the smelting, we are sustained by an in-
stinctive knowledge that we are being made into some-
thing better. For this we know, quite incommunicably,
and yet as surely as we know that we will to have it
thus.

And it is this will that stirs in us to have the crea-
tures of earth and the aflfairs of earth, not as they are,
but "as they ought to be," which we call romance. But
when we note how visibly it sways all life we perceive
that we are talking about God.

THE FISH REPORTER
By Robert Cortes Holliday

This informal commentary on the picturesque humors of trade
journalism is typical of Mr. Holliday's great skill in capturing
the actual vibration of urban life. He has something of George
Gissing's taste for the actuality of city scenes and characters,
with rather more pungent idiosyncrasy in his manner of self-
expression. Careful observers of the art of writing will see
how much shrewd skill there is in the apparently unstudied man-
ner. One of Mr. Holliday's favorite discussions on the art of
writing is a phrase of Booth Tarkington's — "How to get the
ink out of it." In other words, how to strip away mere literary
and conscious adornment, and to get down to a translucent
portraiture of life itself in its actual contour and profile.

We are told that Mr. Holliday, in his native Indianapolis
(where he was born in 1880), was a champion bicycle rider
at the age of sixteen. That triumph, however, was not per-
manently satisfying, for he came to New York in 1899 to study
art; lived for a while, precariously, as an illustrator; worked for
several years as a bookseller in Charles Scribner's retail store,
and passed through all sorts of curious jobs on Grub Street,
among others book reviewer on the Tribune and Times. He was
editor of The Bookman after that magazine was taken over by
the George H. Doran Company, and retired to the genteel dig-
nity of "contributing editor" in 1920, to obtain leisure for more
writing of his own.

Mr. Holliday has the genuine gift of the personal essay, mel-
low, fluent, and pleasantly eccentric. His Walking-Stick Papers,
Broome Street Sfrazvs, Turns about Toivn and Peeps at People
have that charming rambling humor that descends to him from
his masters in this art, Hazlitt and Thackeray. When Mr. Hol-
liday was racking his wits for a title for Men and Books and
Cities hhat odd Borrovian chronicle of his mind, body and
digestion on tour across the continent) I suggested The Odyssey
of an Oddity. He deprecated this; but I still think it would have
been a good title, because strictly true.

Men of genius, blown by the winds of chance, have
been, now and then, mariners, bar-keeps, schoolmasters,

3t6

The Fish Reporter 317

soldiers, politicians, clergymen, and what not. And
from these pursuits have they sucked the essence of
yams and in the setting of these activities found a
flavor to stir and to charm hearts untold. Now, it is
a thousand pities that no man of genius has ever been
a fish reporter. Thus has the world lost great literary
treasure, as it is highly probable that there is not
under the sun any prospect so filled with the scents and
colors of story as that presented by the commerce in
fish.

Take whale oil. Take the funny old buildings on
Front Street, out of paintings, I declare, by Howard
Pyle, where the large merchants in whale oil are.
Take salt fish. Do you know the oldest salt-fish house
in America, down by Coenties Slip ? Ah ! you should.
The ghost of old Long John Silver, I suspect, smokes
an occasional pipe in that old place. And many are
the times I've seen the slim shade of young Jim
Hawkins come running out. Take Labrador cod for
export to the Mediterranean lands or to Porto Rico
via New York. Take herrings brought to this port
from Iceland, from Holland, and from Scotland;
mackerel from Ireland, from the Magdalen Islands,
and from Cape Breton; crabmeat from Japan; fish-
balls from Scandinavia; sardines from Norway and
from France ; caviar from Russia ; shrimp which comes
from Florida, Mississippi, and Georgia, or salmon

3i8 Robert Cortes Holliday

from Alaska, and Puget Sound, and the Columbia
River.

Take the obituaries of fishermen. ''In his prime, it
is said, there was not a better skipper in the Gloucester
fishing fieet.'* Take disasters to schooners, smacks,
and trawlers. "The crew were landed, but lost all
their belongings." New vessels, sales, etc. "The seal-
ing schooner Tillie B., whose career in the South Seas
is well known, is reported to have been sold to a mov-
ing-picture firm." Sponges from the Caribbean Sea
and the Gulf of Mexico. "To most people, familiar
only with the sponges of the shops, the animal as it
comes from the sea would be rather unrecognizable."
Why, take anything you please! It is such stuff as
stories are. And as you eat your fish from the store
how little do you reck of the glamor of what you are
doing !

However, as it seems to me unlikely that a man of
genius will be a fish reporter shortly I will myself do
the best I can to paint the tapestry of the scenes of his
calling. The advertisement in the newspaper read:
"Wanted — Reporter for weekly trade paper." Many
called, but I was chosen. Though, doubtless, no man
living knew less about fish than I.

The news stands are each like a fair, so laden are
they with magazines in bright colors. It would seem
almost as if there were a different magazine for every

The Fish Reporter 319

few hundred and seven-tenth person, as the statistics
put these matters. And yet, it seems, there is a vast,
a very vast, periodical literature of which we, that is,
magazine readers in general, know nothing whatever.
There is, for one, that fine, old, standard publication,
Barrel and Box, devoted to the subjects and the in-
terests of the coopering industry; there is too. The
Dried Fruit Packer and Western Canner, as alert a
magazine as one could wish — in its kind; and from
the home of classic American literature comes The
'New England Tradesman and Grocer. And so on. At
/he place alone where we went to press twenty-seven
trade journals were printed every week, from one for
butchers to one for bankers.

The Fish Industries Gazette — Ah, yes! For some
reason not clear (though it is an engaging thing, I
think) the word ''gazette" is the great word among
the titles of trade journals. There are The Jewellers*
Gazette and The Women's Wear Gazette and The
Poulterers' Gazette (of London), and The Maritime
Gazette (of Halifax), and other gazettes quite without
number. This word "gazette" makes its appeal, too,
curiously enough, to those who christen country
papers; and trade journals have much of the intimate
charm of country papers. The "trade" in each case is
a kind of neighborly community, separated in its parts
by space, but joined in unity of sympathy. "Per-

320 Robert Cortes Holliday

sonals" are a vital feature of trade papers. "Walter
Conner, who for some time has conducted a bakery
and fish market at Hudson, N. Y., has removed to
Fort Edward, leaving his brother Ed in charge at the
Hudson place of business."

The Fish Industries Gazette, as I sav, was one of
several in its field, in friendly rivalry with The Oyster
Trade and Fisherman and The Pacific Fisheries. It
comprised two departments : the fresh fish and oyster
department, and myself. I was, as an editorial an-
nouncement said at the beginning of my tenure of
office, a '^reorganization of our salt, smoked, and
pickled fish department." The delectable, mellow spirit
of the country paper, so removed from the crash and
whirr of metropolitan journalism, rested in this, too,
that upon the Gazette I did practically everything on
the paper except the linotyping. Reporter, editorial
writer, exchange editor, make-up man, proof-reader,
correspondent, advertisement solicitor, was I.

As exchange editor, did I read all the papers in the
English language in eager search of fish news. And
while you are about the matter, just find me a finer bit
of literary style evoking the romance of the vast
wastes of the moving sea, in Stevenson, Defoe, any-
where you please, than such a news item as this:
"Capt. Ezra Pound, of the bark EInora, of Salem,
Mass., spoke a lonely vessel in latitude this and longi'

The Fish Reporter 321

tude that, September 8. She proved to be the whaler
Wanderer, and her captain said that she had been nine
months at sea, that all on board were well, and that
he had stocked so many barrels of whale oil.''

As exchange editor was it my business to peruse re-
ports from Eastport, Maine, to the effect that one of
the worst storms in recent years had destroyed large
numbers of the sardine weirs there. To seek fish
recipes, of such savory sound as those for "broiled
redsnapper," "shrimps bordelaise,'' and "baked fish
croquettes." To follow fishing conditions in the North
Sea occasioned by the Great War. To hunt down jokes
of piscatory humor. "The man who drinks like a fish
does not take kindly to water.— Exchange." To find
other "fillers" in the consular reports and elsewhere:
*Tish culture in India," "1800 Miles in a Dory/'
'^Chinese Carp for the Philippines," "Americans as
Fish Eaters." And, to use a favorite term of trade
papers, "etc., etc." Then to "paste up" the winnowed
fruits of this beguiling research.

As editorial writer, to discuss the report of the
commission recently sent by congress to the Pribilof
Islands, Alaska, to report on the condition of our na-
tional herd of fur seals; to discuss the official interpre-
tation here of the Government ruling on what consti-
tutes "boneless" codfish; to consider the campaign in
Canada to promote there a more popular consumption

322 Robert Cortes Holliday

of fish, and to brightly remark a propos of this that
"a fish a day keeps the doctor away" ; to review the
current issue of The Journal of the Fisheries Society
of Japan, containing leading articles on ''Are Fishing
Motor Boats Able to Encourage in Our Country" and
*Tisherman the Late Mr. H. Yamaguchi Well
Known"; to combat the prejudice against dogfish as
food, a prejudice like that against eels, in some quarters
eyed askance as ''calling cousins with the great sea-
serpent," as Juvenal says; to call attention to the doom
of one of the most picturesque monuments in the story
of fish, the passing of the pleasant and celebrated old
Trafalgar Hotel at Greenwich, near London, scene of
the famous Ministerial white-bait dinners of the days
of Pitt; to make a jest on an exciting idea suggested
by some medical man that some of the features of a
Ritz-Carlton Hotel, that is, baths, be introduced into
the fo'c's'les of Grand Banks fishing vessels; to keep
an eye on the activities of our Bureau of Fisheries; to
hymn a praise to the monumental new Fish Pier at
Boston; to glance at conditions at the premier fish
market of the world. Billingsgate; to herald the fish
display at the Canadian National Exhibition at
Toronto, and, indeed, etc., and again etc.

As general editorial roustabout, to find each week a
"leader," a translation, say, from In Allgerncine Fish-
cherei-Zeitung, or Economic Circular No. lo, "Mus-

The Fish Reporter 323

sels in the Tributaries of the Missouri," or the last
biennial report of the Superintendent of Fisheries of
Wisconsin, or a scientific paper on "The Porpoise in
Captivity" reprinted by permission of Zoologica, of
the New York Zoological Society. To find each week
for reprint a poem appropriate in sentiment to the feel-
ing of the paper. One of the "Salt Water Ballads"
would do, or John Masefield singing of "the whale's
way," or "Down to the white dipping sails"; or Rupert
Brooke : "And in that heaven of all their wish. There
shall be no more land, say fish" ; or a "weather rhyme"
about "mackerel skies," when "you're sure to get a
fishing day"; or something from the New York Sun
about "the lobster pots of Maine"; or Oliver Herford,
in the Century, "To a Goldfish" ; or, best of all, an old
song of fishing ways of other days.

And to compile from the New York Journal of Com-
merce better poetry than any of this, tables, beautiful
tables of "imports into New York": "Oct. 15. —
From Bordeaux, 225 cs. cuttlefish bone; Copenhagen,
"^yZ P^gs. fish; Liverpool, 969 bbls. herrings, 10 walrus
hides, 2,000 bags salt; La Guayra, 6 cs. fish sounds;
Belize, 9 bbls. sponges; Rotterdam, 7 pkgs. seaweed,
9,000 kegs herrings; Barcelona, 235 cs. sardines;
Bocas Del Toro, 5 cs. turtle shells; Genoa, 3 boxes
corals; Tampico, 2 pkgs. sponges; Halifax, i cs. seal
skins, 35 bbls. cod liver oil, 215 cs. lobsters, 490 bbls.

324 Robert Cortes Holliday

codfish; Akureyri, 4,150 bbls. salted herrings," and
much more. Beautiful tables of "exports from New
York." "To Australia" (cleared Sep. i) ; "to Argen-
tina";— Haiti, Jamaica, Guatemala, Scotland, Salva-
dor, Santo Domingo, England, and to places many
more. And many other gorgeous tables, too. "Fish-
ing vessels at New York," for one, listing the "trips"
brought into this port by the Stranger, the Sarah
O'Neal, the Nourmahal, a farrago of charming sounds,
and a valuable tale of facts.

As make-up man, of course, so to "dress" the paper
that the "markets," Oporto, Trinidad, Porto Rico,
Demerara, Havana, would be together; that "Nova
Scotia Notes" — "Weather conditions for curing have
been more favorable since October set in" — would fol-
low "Halifax Fish Market" — "Last week's arrivals
were: Oct. 13, schr. Haftie Loring, 960 quintals,"
etc.— that "Pacific Coast Notes" — "The tug Tatoosh
will perform the service for the Seattle salmon packers
of towing a vessel from Seattle to this port via the
Panama Canal" — would follow "Canned Salmon";
that shellfish matter would be in one place ; reports of
saltfish where such should be; that the weekly tale of
the canned fish trade politically embraced the canned
fish advertising; and so on and so on.

Finest of all, as reporter, to go where the fish re-
porter goes. There the sight-seeing cars never find

The Fish Reporter 32c

their way; the hurried commuter has not his path, nor
knows of these things at all ; and there that racy char-
acter who, voicing a multitude, declares that he would
rather be a lamp post on Broadway than Mayor of St.
Louis, goes not for to see. Up lower Greenwich Street
the fish reporter goes, along an eerie, dark, and nar-
row way, beneath a strange, thundering roof, the
'X" overhead. He threads his way amid seemingly
chaotic, architectural piles of boxes, of barrels, crates,
casks, kegs, and bulging bags ; roundabout many great
fetlocked draught horses, frequently standing or
plunging upon the sidewalk, and attached to many
huge trucks and wagons; and much of the time in the
street he is compelled to go, finding the side walks too
congested with the traffic of commerce to admit of his
passing there.

You probably eat butter, and eggs, and cheese. Then
you would delight in Greenwich Street. You could
feast your highly creditable appetite for these excel-
lent things for very nearly a solid mile upon the signs
of "wholesale dealers and commission merchants" in
them. The letter press, as you might say, of the fish
reporter's walk is a noble paean to the earth's glorious
yield for the joyous sustenance of man. For these
princely merchants' signs sing of opulent stores of
olive oil, of sausages, beans, soups, extracts, and spices,
sugar, Spanish, Bermuda, and Havana onions, "fine"

326 Robert Cortes Holliday

apples, teas, coffee, rice, chocolates, dried fruits and
raisins, and of loaves and of fishes, and of ''fish pro-
ducts." Lo ! dark and dirty and thundering Greenwich
Street is to-day's translation of the Garden of Eden.

Here is a great house whose sole vocation is the im-
portation of caviar for barter here. Caviar from
over-seas now comes, wdien it comes at all, mainly by
the way of Archangel, recently put on the map, for
most of us, by the war. The fish reporter is told, how-
ever, if it be summer, that there cannot be much doing
in the way of caviar until fall, "when the spoonbill
start coming in." And on he goes to a great saltfish
house, where many men in salt-stained garments are
running about, their arms laden with large flat objects,
of sharp and jagged edge, which resemble dried and
crackling hides of some animal curiously like a huge
fish; and numerous others of "the same" are trundling
round wheelbarrow-like trucks likewise so laden.
Where stacks of these hides stand on their tails against
the walls, and goodness knows how many big boxes
are, containing, as those open show, beautifully soft,
thick, cream-colored slabs, which is fish. And where
still other men, in overalls stained like a painter's
palette, are knocking off the heads of casks and dipping
out of brine still other kinds of fish for inspection.

Here it is said by the head of the house, by the
stove (it is chill weather) in his office like a ship-

The Fish Reporter 327

master's cabin : "Strong market on foreign mackerel.
Mines hinder Norway catch. Advices from abroad re-
port that German resources continue to purchase all
available supplies from the Norwegian fishermen. No
Irish of any account. Recent shipment sold on the
deck at high prices. Fair demand from the Middle
West."

So, by stages, on up to turn into North Moore
Street, looking down a narrow lane between two long
bristling rows of wagons pointed out from the curbs,
to the facades of the North River docks at the bottom,
with the tops of the buff funnels of ocean liners, and
Whistleranean silhouettes of derricks, rising beyond.
Hereabout are more importers, exporters, and "pro-
ducers" of fish, famous in their calling beyond the
celebrities of popular publicity. And he that has official
entree may learn, by mounting dusky stairs, half-
ladder and half-stair, and by passing through low-
ceilinged chambers freighted with many barrels, to the
sanctums of the fish lords, what's doing in the foreign
herring way, and get the current market quotations, at
present sky-high, and hear that the American shore
mackerel catch is very fine stock.

Then roundabout, with a step into the broad vista of
homely Washington Street, and a turn through Frank-
lin Street, where is the man decorated by the Imperial
Japanese Government with a gold medal, if he should

328 Robert Cortes Holliday

care to wear it, for having distinguished himself in
the development of commerce in the marine products
of Japan, back to Hudson Street. An authentic rail-
road is one of the spectacular features of Hudson
Street.

Here down the middle of the way are endless trains,
stopping, starting, crashing, laden to their ears with
freight, doubtless all to eat. Tourists should come
from very far to view Hudson Street. Here is a spec-
tacle as fascinating, as awe-inspiring, as extraordinary
as any in the world. From dawn until darkness falls,
hour after hour, along Hudson Street slowly, steadily
moves a mighty procession of great trucks. One
would not suppose there were so many trucks on the
face of the earth. It is a glorious sight, and any man
whose soul is not dead should jump with joy to see it.
And the thunder of them altogether as they bang over
the stones is like the music of the spheres.

There is on Hudson Street a tall handsome building
where the fish reporter goes, which should be enjoyed
in this way : Up in the lift you go to the top, and then
you walk down, smacking your lips. For all the doors
in that building are brimming with poetry. And the
tune of it goes like this: "Toasted Corn-Flake Co.,'*
"Seaboard Rice," "Chili Products," "Red Bloom
Grape Juice Sales Office," "Porto Rico and Singapore
Pineapple Co.," "Sunnyland Foodstuffs," "Importers

The Fish Reporter 329

of Fruit Pulps, Pimentos," ''Sole Agents U. S. A.
Italian Salad Oil," "Raisin Growers," ''Log Cabin
Syrups," "Jobbers in Beans, Peas," "Chocolate and
Cocoa Preparations," "Ohio Evaporated Milk Co.,"
"Bernese Alps and Holland Condensed Milk Co.,*'
"Brazilian Nuts Co.," "Brokers Pacific Coast Salmon,"
"California Tuna Co.," and thus on and on.

The fish reporter crosses the street to see the head of
the Sardine Trust, who has just thrown the market
into excitement by a heavy cut in prices of last year's
pack. Thence, pausing to refresh himself by the way
at a sign "Agency for Reims Champagne and Moselle
Wines — Bordeaux Clarets and Sauternes," over to
Broadway to interview the most august persons of all,
dealers in fertilizer, "fish scrap." These mighty
gentlemen live, when at business, in palatial suites of
offices constructed of marble and fine woods and laid
with rich rugs. The reporter is relayed into the inner-
most sanctum by a succession of richly clothed at-
tendants. And he learns, it may be, that fishing in
Chesapeake Bay is so poor that some of the "fish fac-
tories" may decide to shut down. Acid phosphate, it
is said, is ruling at $13 f.o.b. Baltimore.

And so the fish reporter enters upon the last lap of
his rounds. Through, perhaps, the narrow, crooked
lane of Pine Street he passes, to come out at length
upon a scene set for a sea tale. Here would a lad, heir

530 Robert Cortes Holliday

to vast estates in Virginia, be kidnapped and smuggled
aboard to be sold a slave in Africa. This is Front
Street. A white ship lies at the foot of it. Cranes
rise at her side. Tugs, belching smoke, bob beyond.
All about are ancient warehouses, redolent of the
Thames, with steep roofs and sometimes stairs outside,
and with tall shutters, a crescent-shaped hole in each.
There is a dealer in weather-vanes. Other things dealt
in hereabout are these : chronometers, ''nautical instru-
ments," wax gums, cordage and twine, marine paints,
cotton wool and waste, turpentine, oils, greases, and
rosin. Queer old taverns, public houses, are here, too.
Why do not their windows rattle with a **Yo, ho, ho" ?
There is an old, old house w^hose business has been
fish oil within the memory of men. And here is an-
other. Next, through Water Street, one comes in
search of the last word on salt fish. Now the air is
filled with gorgeous smell of roasting coffee. Tea,
coffee, sugar, rice, spices, bags and bagging here have
their home. And there are haughty bonded ware-
houses filled with fine liquors. From his white cabin
at the top of a venerable structure comes the dean of
the saltfish business. ''Export trade fair," he says;
"good demand from South America."

SOME NONSENSE ABOUT A DOG
By Harry Esty Bounce

Harry Esty Bounce was born in Syracuse in 1889 and gradu-
ated from Hamilton College in 1910. His first job was as a
cub reporter on the journal that newspapermen affectionately
call "the old Sun"; the adjective is pronounced as though it
were in italics. He was on the staff of the Syracuse Herald,
1912-14; spent a year in New Orleans writing short stories, and
returned in 1916 to the magazine staff of the Sun. He was
editor of the Sun's book review section, 1919-20; in 1920 he
joined the staff of the New York Evening Post.

"My hand will miss the insinuated nose — "

Sir William Watson.

But the dog that was written of must have been a
big dog. Nibbie was just a comfortable lapful, once
he had duly turned around and curled up with his nose
in his tail.

This is for people who know about dogs, in particu-
lar little mongrels without pedigree or market value.
Other people, no doubt, will find it disgustingly maud-
lin. I would have found it so before Nibbie came.

The day he came was a beautiful bright, cool one in
an August. A touring car brought him. They put
him down on our corner, meaning to lose him, but he
crawled under the car, and they had to prod him out
and throw stones before they could drive on. So that

331

22^ Harry Esty D ounce

when I came home I found, with his mistress-elect, a
sort of potbelHed bundle of tarry oakum, caked with
mud, panting convulsively still from fright, and show-
ing the whites of uncommonly liquid brown eyes and a
pink tongue. There was tennis that evening and he
went along — I carried him over the railroad tracks;
he gave us no trouble about the balls, but lay huddled
under the bench where she sat, and shivered if a man
came near him.

That night he got chop bones and she got a sensible
homily on the unwisdom of feeding strays, and he was
left outdoors. He slept on the mat. The second morn-
ing we thought he had gone. The third, he was back,
wagging approval of us and intent to stay, which
seemed to leave no choice but to take him in. We had
fun over names. "Jellywaggles," suggested from next
door, was undeniably descriptive. ''Rags" fitted, or
"Toby" or ''Nig" — but they had a colored maid next
door; finally we called him "Nibs," and soon his tail
would answer to it.

Cleaned up — scrubbed, the insoluble matted locks
clipped from his coat, his trampish collar replaced with
a new one bearing a license tag — he was far from being
unpresentable. A vet. once opined that for a mongrel
he was a good dog, that a black cocker mother had
thrown her cap over Scottish mills, so to speak. This
analysis accounted for him perfectly. Always, depend-

Some Nonsense About a Dog 333

ing on the moment's mood, he was either terrier or
spaniel, the snap and scrap and perk of the one alternat-
ing with the gentle snuggling indolence of the other.

As terrier he would dig furiously by the hour after
a field mouse; as spaniel he would *'read" the breeze
with the best nose among the dog folk of our neigh-
borhood, or follow a trail quite well. I know there was
retrieving blood. A year ago May he caught and
brought me, not doing the least injury, an oriole that
probably had flown against a wire and was struggling
disabled in the grass.

Nibbie was shabby-genteel black, sunburnt as to the
mustache, grizzled as to the raggy fringe on his
haunches. He had a white stock and shirt-frill and a
white fore paw. The brown eyes full of heart were the
best point. His body coat was rough Scottish worsted,
the little black pate was cotton-soft like shoddy, and
the big black ears were genuine spaniel silk. As a
terrier he held them up smartly and carried a plumy
fishhook of a tail; as a spaniel the ears drooped and
the tail swung meekly as if in apology for never having
been clipped. The other day when we had to say
good-by to him each of us cut one silky tuft from an
ear, very much as we had so often when he'd been
among the burdocks in the field where the garden is.

Burrs were by no means Nibbie's only failing. In
flea time it seemed hardly possible that a dog of his size

334 Harry Esty Dounce

could sustain his population. We finally found a true
flea bane, but, deserted one day, he was populous again
the next. They don't relish every human ; me they did ;
I used to storm at him for it, and he used, between
spasms of scratching, to listen admiringly and wag.
We think he supposed his tormentors were winged in-
sects, for he sought refuge in dark clothes-closets
where a flying imp wouldn't logically come.

He was wilful, insisted on landing in laps when their
makers wanted to read. He would make advances to
visitors who were polite about him. He would get up
on the living-room table, why and how, heaven knows,
finding his opportunity when we were out of the house,
and taking care to be upstairs on a bed — white, grime-
able coverlets preferred — by the time we had the front
door open; I used to slip up to the porch and catch
through a window the diving flourish of his sinful tail.

One of his faults must have been a neurosis really.
He led a hard life before we took him in, as witnessed
the game hind leg that made him sit up side-saddle
fashion, and two such scars on his back as boiling hot
grease might have made. And something especially
cruel had been done to him when asleep, for if you
bent over him napping or in his bed he would half
rouse and growl, and sometimes snap blindly. ("We
dreaded exuberant visiting children.) Two or three
experiments I hate to remember now convinced me that

Some Nonsense About a Dog 335

it couldn't be whipped out of him, and once wide awake
he was sure to be perplexedly apologetic.

He was spoiled. That was our doing. We babied
him abominably — he was, for two years, the only sub-
ject we had for such malpractice. He had more foolish
names than Wogg, that dog of Mrs. Stevenson's, and
heard more Little Language than Stella ever did, re-
ciprocating by kissing proffered ears in his doggy way.
Once he had brightened up after his arrival, he showed
himself ready to take an ell whenever we gave an inch,
and he was always taking them, and never paying
penalties. He had conscience enough to be sly. I re-
member the summer evening we stepped outside for
just an instant, and came back to find a curious groove
across the butter, on the dining table, and an ever-so-
innocent Nibbie in a chair in the next room.

While we were at the table he was generally around
it, bulldozing for tid-bits — I fear he had reason to
know that this would work. One fortnight when his
Missie was away he slept on his Old Man's bed (we
had dropped titles of dignity with him by then) and
he rang the welkin hourly, answering far-away dog
friends, and occasionally came north to lollop my face
with tender solicitude, just like the fool nurse in the
story, waking the patient up to ask if he was sleeping
well.

More recently, when a beruffled basket was waiting,

336 Harry Esty Dounce

he developed an alarming trick of stealing in there to
try it, so I fitted that door with a hook, insuring a crack
impervious to dogs. And the other night I had to
take the hook, now useless, off; we couldn't stand
hearing it jingle. He adopted the junior member on
first sight and sniff of him, by the way; would look on
beaming as proudly as if he'd hatched him.

The last of his iniquities arose from a valor that
lacked its better part, an absurd mixture of Falstaff
and bantam rooster. At the critical point he'd back
out of a fuss with a dog of his own size. But let a
police dog, an Airedale, a St. Bernard, or a big ugly
cur appear and Nibble was all around him, black-
guarding him unendurably. It was lucky that the big
dogs in our neighborhood were patient. And he never
would learn about automobiles. Usually tried to tackle
them head on, often stopped cars with merciful drivers.
When the car wouldn't stop, luck would save him by a
fraction of an inch. I couldn't spank that out of him
either. We had really been expecting what finally
happened for two years.

That's about all. Too much, I am afraid. A decent
fate made it quick the other night, and clean and close
at hand, in fact, on the same street corner where once
a car had left the small scapegrace for us. We tell
ourselves how glad we are it happened as it did, in-
stead of an agonal ending such as many of his people

Some Nonsense About a Dog 337

come to. We tell ourselves we couldn't have had him
for ever in any event; that some day, for the junior
member's sake, we shall get another dog. We keep
telling ourselves these things, and talking with anima-
tion on other topics. The muzzle, the leash, the drink-
ing dish are hidden, the last muddy paw track swept up,
the nose smudges washed off the favorite front win-
dow pane.

But the house is full of a little snoofing, wagging,
loving ghost. I know how the boy Thoreau felt about
a hereafter with dogs barred. I want to think that
somewhere, some time, I will be coming home again,
and that when the door opens Nibbie will be on hand
to caper welcome.

THE FIFTY-FIRST DRAGON
By Heywood Broun

Heywood Broun, who has risen rapidly through the ranks of
newspaper honor from sporting reporter and war correspondent
to one of the most highly regarded dramatic and literary critics
in the country, is another of these Harvard men, but, as far
as this book is concerned, the last of them. Broun graduated
from Harvard in 1910; was several years on the New York
Tribune, and is now on the World.

There is no more substantially gifted newspaper man in his
field ; his beautifully spontaneous humor and drollery are coun-
terbalanced by a fine imaginative sensitiveness and a remarkable
power in the fable or allegorical essay, such as the one here
reprinted. His book, Seeing Things at Night, is only the first-
fruit of truly splendid possibilities. If I may be allowed to
prophesy, thus hazarding all, I will say that Heywood Broun
is likely, in the next ten or fifteen years, to do as fine work,
both imaginative and critical, as any living American of his era.

Of all the pupils at the knight school Gawaine le
Coeur-Hardy was among the least promising. He was
tall and sturdy, but his instructors soon discovered that
he lacked spirit. He would hide in the woods when
the jousting class was called, although his companions
and members of the faculty sought to appeal to his
better nature by shouting to him to come out and break
his neck like a man. Even when they told him that the
lances were padded, the horses no more than ponies
and the field unusually soft for late autumn, Gawaine
refused to grow enthusiastic. The Headmaster and
the Assistant Professor of Pleasaunce were discussing
the case one spring afternoon and the Assistant Pro-
fessor could see no remedy but expulsion.

338

The Fifty-first Dragon 339

*TvIo," said the Headmaster, as he looked out at
the purple hills which ringed the school, "I think I'U
train him to slay dragons."

*'He might be killed," objected the Assistant Pro-
fessor.

"So he might," replied the Headmaster brighdy, but
he added, more soberly, "we must consider the greater
good. We are responsible for the formation of this
lad's character."

"Are the dragons particularly bad this year ?" inter-
rupted the Assistant Professor. This was characteris-
tic. He always seemed restive when the head of the
school began to talk ethics and the ideals of the institu-
tion.

"I've never known them worse," replied the Head-
master. "Up in the hills to the south last week they
killed a number of peasants, two cows and a prize pig.
And if this dry spell holds there's no telling when they
may start a forest fire simply by breathing around
indiscriminately."

"Would any refund on the tuition fee be
necessary in case of an accident to young Coeur-
Hardy?"

"No," the principal answered, judicially, "that's all
covered in the contract. But as a matter of fact he
won't be killed. Before I send him up in the hills I'm
going to give him a magic word."

340 Heywood Broun

^That's a good idea," said the Professor. *'Some-
times they work wonders."

From that day on Gawaine specialized in dragons.
His course included both theory and practice. In the
morning there were long lectures on the history,
anatomy, manners and customs of dragons. Gawaine
did not distinguish himself in these studies. He had
a marvelously versatile gift for forgetting things. In
the afternoon he showed to better advantage, for then
he would go down to the South Meadow and practise
with a battle-ax. In this exercise he was truly impres-
sive, for he had enormous strength as well as speed
and grace. He even developed a deceptive display of
ferocity. Old alumni say that it was a thrilling sight
to see Gawaine charging across the field toward the
dummy paper dragon which had been set up for his
practice. As he ran he would brandish his ax and
shout ''A murrain on thee !" or some other vivid bit
of campus slang. It never took him more than one
stroke to behead the dummy dragon.

Gradually his task was made more difficult. Paper
gave way to papier-mache and finally to wood, but
even the toughest of these dummy dragons had no
terrors for Gawaine. One sweep of the ax always did
the business. There were those who said that when
the practice was protracted until dusk and the dragons
threw long, fantastic shadows across the meadow

The Fifty-first Dragon 341

Gawaine did not charge so impetuously nor shout so
loudly. It is possible there was malice in this charge.
At any rate, the Headmaster decided by the end of
June that it was time for the test. Only the night be-
fore a dragon had come close to the school grounds
and had eaten some of the lettuce from the garden.
The faculty decided that Gawaine was ready. They
gave him a diploma and a new battle-ax and
the Headmaster summoned him to a private confer-
ence.

*'Sit down/^ said the Headmaster. "Have a ciga-
rette."

Gawaine hesitated.

"Oh, I know it's against the rules," said the Head-
master. "But after all, you have received your pre-
liminary degree. You are no longer a boy. You are a
man. To-morrow you will go out into the world, the
great world of achievement."

Gawaine took a cigarette. The Headmaster offered
him a match, but he produced one of his own and
began to puff away with a dexterity which quite
amazed the principal.

"Here you have learned the theories of life," con-
tinued the Headmaster, resuming the thread of his
discourse, "but after all, life is not a matter of theories.
Life is a matter of facts. It calls on the young and the
old alike to face these facts, even though they are hard

342 Heywood Broun

and sometimes unpleasant. Your problem, for exam-
ple, is to slay dragons."

*They say that those dragons down in the south
wood are five hundred feet long," ventured Gavvaine,
timorously.

*'Stuff and nonsense !" said the Headmaster. "The
curate saw one last week from the top of Arthur's Hill.
The dragon was sunning himself down in the valley.
The curate didn't have an opportunity to look at him
very long because he felt it was his duty to hurry back
to make a report to me. He said the monster, or shall
I say, the big lizard? — wasn't an inch over two hun-
dred feet. But the size has nothing at all to do with it.
You'll find the big ones even easier than the little
ones. They're far slower on their feet and less aggres-
sive, I'm told. Besides, before you go I'm going to
equip you in such fashion that you need have no fear
of all the dragons in the world,"

*T'd like an enchanted cap," said Gawaine.

"What's that?" answered the Headmaster, testily.

"A cap to make me disappear," explained Gawaine.

The Headmaster laughed indulgently. "You mustn't
believe all those old wives' stories," he said. "There
isn't any such thing. A cap to make you disappear,
indeed! What would vou do with it? You haven't
even appeared yet. Why, my boy, you could walk
from here to London, and nobody would so much as

The Fifty- fir St Dragon 343

look at you. You're nobody. You couldn't be more
invisible than that."

Gawaine seemed dangerously close to a relapse into
his old habit of whimpering. The Headmaster reas-
sured him : "Don't worry ; I'll give you something much
better than an enchanted cap. I'm going to give you
a magic word. All you have to do is to repeat this
magic charm once and no dragon can possibly harm a
hair of your head. You can cut off his head at your
leisure."

He took a heavy book from the shelf behind his desk
and began to run through it. "Sometimes," he said,
"the charm is a whole phrase or even a sentence.
I might, for instance, give you 'To make the' — No,
that might not do. I think a single word would be
best for dragons."

"A short word," suggested Gawaine.

*Tt can't be too short or it wouldn't be potent.
There isn't so much hurry as all that. Here's a splen-
did magic word : 'Rumplesnitz.* Do you think you
can learn that?"

Gawaine tried and in an hour or so he seemed to
have the word well in hand. Again and again he in-
terrupted the lesson to inquire, "And if I say 'Rumple-
snitz' the dragon can't possibly hurt me?" And al-
ways the Headmaster replied, "If you only say *Rum-
plesnitz,' you are perfectly safe."

344 Heywood Broun

Toward morning Gawaine seemed resigned to his
career. At daybreak the Headmaster saw him to the
edge of the forest and pointed him to the direction in
which he should proceed. About a mile away to the
southwest a cloud of steam hovered over an open
meadow in the woods and the Headmaster assured
Gawaine that under the steam he would find a dragon.
Gawaine went forward slowly. He wondered whether
it would be best to approach the dragon on the run
as he did in his practice in the South Meadow or to
walk slowly toward him, shouting "Rumplesnitz" all
the way.

The problem was decided for him. No sooner had
he come to the fringe of the meadow than the dragon
spied him and began to charge. It was a large dragon
and yet it seemed decidedly aggressive in spite of
the Headmaster's statement to the contrary. As the
dragon charged it released huge clouds of hissing steam
through its nostrils. It was almost as if a gigantic
teapot had gone mad. The dragon came forward so
fast and Gawaine was so frightened that he had time
to say *'Rumplesnitz** only once. As he said it, he
swung his battle-ax and off popped the head of the
dragon. Gawaine had to admit that it was even easier
to kill a real dragon than a wooden one if only you
said "Rumplesnitz."

Gawaine brought the ears home and a small section

The Fifty-first Dragon 345

of the tail. His school mates and the faculty made
much of him, but the Headmaster wisely kept him from
being spoiled by insisting that he go on with his work.
Every clear day Gawaine rose at dawn and went out
to kill dragons. The Headmaster kept him at home
when it rained, because he said the woods were damp
and unhealthy at such times and that he didn't want
the boy to run needless risks. Few good days passed
in which Gawaine failed to get a dragon. On one
particularly fortunate day he killed three, a husband
and wife and a visiting relative. Gradually he de-
veloped a technique. Pupils who sometimes watched
him from the hill-tops a long way off said that he often
allowed the dragon to come within a few feet before
he said ''Rumplesnitz." He came to say it with a
mocking sneer. Occasionally he did stunts. Once
w^hen an excursion party from London was watching
him he went into action with his right hand tied behind
his back. The dragon's head came off just as easily.

As Gawaine's record of killings mounted higher the
Headmaster found it impossible to keep him com-
pletely in hand. He fell into the habit of stealing out
at night and engaging in long drinking bouts at the
village tavern. It was after such a debauch that he
rose a little before dawn one fine August morning and
started out after his fiftieth dragon. His head was
heavy and his mind sluggish. He was heavy in other

346 Heywood Broun

respects as well, for he had adopted the somewhat
vulgar practice of wearing his medals, ribbons and all,
when he went out dragon hunting. The decorations
began on his chest and ran all the way down to his
abdomen. They must have weighed at least eight
pounds.

Gawaine found a dragon in the same meadow where
he had killed the first one. It was a fair-sized dragon,
but evidently an old one. Its face was wrinkled and
Gawaine thought he had never seen so hideous a coun-
tenance. Much to the lad's disgust, the monster re-
fused to charge and Gawaine was obliged to walk to-
ward him. He whistled as he went. The dragon
regarded him hopelessly, but craftily. Of course it had
heard of Gawaine. Even when the lad raised his
battle-ax the dragon made no move. It knew that
there was no salvation in the quickest thrust of the
head, for it had been informed that this hunter was
protected by an enchantment. It merely waited, hop-
ing something would turn up. Gawaine raised the
battle-ax and suddenly lowered it again. He had
grown very pale and he trembled violently. The
dragon suspected a trick. "What's the matter?" it
asked, with false solicitude.

''I've forgotten the magic word," stammered
Gawaine.

"What a pity,'* said the dragon. "So that was the

The Fifty-first Dragon 347

secret. It doesn't seem quite sporting to me, all this
magic stuff, you know. Not cricket, as we used to say
when I was a little dragon; but after all, that's a mat-
ter of opinion."

Gawaine was so helpless with terror that the
dragon's confidence rose immeasurably and it could
not resist the temptation to show off a bit.

"Could I possibly be of any assistance?" it asked.
''What's the first letter of the magic word ?"

*'It begins with an 'r,' " said Gawaine weakly.

"Let's see," mused the dragon, "that doesn't tell us
much, does it? What sort of a word is this? Is it an
epithet, do you think?"

Gawaine could do no more than nod.

"Why, of course," exclaimed the dragon, "reaction-
ary Republican."

Gawaine shook his head.

"Well, then," said the dragon, "we'd better get down
to business. Will you surrender ?"

With the suggestion of a compromise Gawaine mus-
tered up enough courage to speak.

"What will you do if I surrender?" he asked.

"Why, I'll eat you," said the dragon.

"And if I don't surrender?"

"I'll eat you just the same."

"Then it doesn't mean any difference, does it?"
moaned Gawaine.

34^ Heywood Broun

*'It does to me," said the dragon with a smile. 'Td
rather you didn't surrender. You'd taste much better
if you didn't."

The dragon waited for a long time for Gawaine to
ask ''Why?" but the boy was too frightened to speak.
At last the dragon had to give the explanation without
his cue line. *'You see," he said, ''if you don't surren-
der you'll taste better because you'll die game."

This was an old and ancient trick of the dragon's.
By means of some such quip he was accustomed to
paralyze his victims with laughter and then to destroy
them. Gawaine was sufficiently paralyzed as it was,
but laughter had no part in his helplessness. With
the last word of the joke the dragon drew back his head
and struck. In that second there flashed into the mind
of Gawaine the magic word "Rumplesnitz," but there
was no time to say it. There was time only to strike
and, without a word, Gawaine met the onrush of the
dragon with a full swing. He put all his back and
shoulders into it. The impact was terrific and the head
of the dragon flew away almost a hundred yards and
landed in a thicket.

Gawaine did not remain frightened very long after
the death of the dragon. His mood was one of won-
der. He was enormously puzzled. He cut off the ears
of the monster almost In a trance. As:aln and aG:aIn he
thought to himself, *'I didn't say 'Rumplesnitz'!" He.

The Fifty-first Dragon 349

was sure of that and yet there was no question that he
had killed the dragon. In fact, he had never killed
one so utterly. Never before had he driven a head
for anything like the same distance. Twenty-five
yards was perhaps his best previous record. All the
way back to the knight school he kept rumbling about
in his mind seeking an explanation for what had oc-
curred. He went to the Headmaster immediately and
after closing the door told him what had happened. "I
didn't say 'Rumplesnitz/ " he explained with great
earnestness.

The Headmaster laughed. "Fm glad youVe found
out," he said. "It makes you ever so much more of a
hero. Don't you see that? Now you know that it
was you who killed all these dragons and not that
foolish little word 'Rumplesnitz.' "

Gawaine frowned. "Then it wasn't a magic word
after all?" he asked.

"Of course not," said the Headmaster, "you ought
to be too old for such foolishness. There isn't any
such thing as a magic word."

"But you told me it was magic," protested Gawaine.
"You said it was magic and now you say it isn't."

"It wasn't magic in a literal sense," answered the
Headmaster, "but it was much more wonderful than
that. The word gave you confidence. It took away
your fears. If I hadn't told you that you might have

350 Heywood Broun

been killed the very first time. It was your battle-ax
did the trick."

Gawaine surprised the Headmaster by his attitude.
He was obviously distressed by the explanation. He
interrupted a long philosophic and ethical discourse by
the Headmaster with, *'If I hadn't of hit 'em all mighty
hard and fast any one of 'em might have crushed me
like a, like a — " He fumbled for a word.

*'Egg shell," suggested the Headmaster.

''Like a tgg shell," assented Gawaine, and he said it
many times. All through the evening meal people who
sat near him heard him muttering, ''Like a tgg shell,
like a tgg shell."

The next day was clear, but Gawaine did not get up
at dawn. Indeed, it was almost noon when the Head-
master found him cowering in bed, with the clothes
pulled over his head. The principal called the Assist-
ant Professor of Pleasaunce, and together they dragged
the boy toward the forest.

"He'll be all right as soon as he gets a couple more
dragons under his belt," explained the Headmaster.

"The Assistant Professor of Pleasaunce agreed. "It
would be a shame to stop such a fine run," he said.
"Why, counting that one yesterday, he's killed fifty
dragons."

They pushed the boy into a thicket above which
hung a meager cloud of steam. It was obviously quita

The Fifty 'first Dragon 351

a small dragon. But Gawaine did not come back that
night or the next. In fact, he never came back. Some
weeks afterward brave spirits from the school explored
the thicket, but they could find nothing to remind them
of Gawaine except the metal parts of his medals. Even
the ribbons had been devoured.

The Headmaster and the Assistant Professor of
Pleasaunce agreed that it would be just as well not to
tell the school how Gawaine had achieved his record
and still less how he came to die. They held that it
might have a bad effect on school spirit. Accordingly,
Gawaine has lived in the memory of the school as its
greatest hero. No visitor succeeds in leaving the build-
ing to-day without seeing a great shield which hangs
on the wall of the dining hall. Fifty pairs of dragons'
ears are mounted upon the shield and underneath in
gilt letters is "Gawaine le Coeur-Hardy," followed by
the simple inscription, ''He killed fifty dragons." The
record has never been equaled.